We at Duke spent the better part of a morning trying to discover why the
Page Preview function in XMetaL does not appear to work. We have not yet
found a solution but perhaps some of this information will be useful. One
problem (there may be others) is with the MSXML processor. It has gone
through a few updates. The MSXML processor accompanies IE 5 but apparently
is buggy. Most of our experience is based on the instructions found at "the
Unofficial MSXML XSLT FAQ page:

http://www.netcrucible.com/xslt/msxml-faq.htm

There is much interesting and hard to comprehend information here including
some step-by-step instructions.

As this site indicates if you do not remember updating your MSXML processor
you probably have not. Further even if you have installed the latest
version there is the possibility that you are still using the older
version. You must actually unregister older versions that might be
conflicting or counteracting newer versions. There is a useful tool at this
website called an MSXML Version Sniffer to see what you have installed.
This will also let you know what is registered. It also appears that the
MSXML processor can be in either "side-by-side" or "replace" mode. "
Side-by-side" may mean that the current version is running in conjunction
with other versions while "replace" indicates that the current version is
running instead of older versions. If you are having problems with the
older MSXML processor you will want to change the mode to "replace" for the
newer version in order to fix the problems with the older version.
Instructions (somewhat difficult to understand) are located on the above
web page. The latest version is MSXML processor 4. Unfortunately this is
still a Technology Preview version and may only work in "side-by-side"
mode. This makes it difficult to know whether "IE is performing XSL
transformations using MSXML4 instead of MSXML3." Please see these sites for
more info and quote source.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?URL=/code/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/594/msdncompositedoc.xml

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/xml/c-frame.htm?/xml/general/newinaprilre.asp



In the end, implementing these changes did not correct the Page Preview
problem in XMetaL. The problem does appear to be with the processor,
however. At this site:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr
=&safe=off&ic=1&th=f2ce078bc79d4c47,7&seekm=OGGVZxFSAHA.241%40cppssbbsa05#p

are a number of other complaints that all cite an error message we have
frequently received and unless they are all using XMetaL and the EAD DTD
(highly unlikely) the problem is not with the DTD, macros, or XMetaL, it is
with this processor.

Sorry if this is too much confusing information. This is what we
accomplished so far. Does anyone have any other ideas? In the end the Page
Preview button is helpful but you can always just go use the "open page"
function in IE to preview an XML document. It is a few more steps but has
the same results.


Thank you for reading all this.

Joshua McKim
Digital Encoding Archivist
Duke University
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