Came across a rather interesting cross platform problem whilst trying to perform a rather simple xsl transformation using PHP. To understand the problem take a look at this little snippet of XSL and see if you can spot what’s wrong with it:

The flaw in the snippet above is that it defines an xsl:param inside an xsl:for-each which is completely invalid. Now earlier today one of my colleagues was refactoring some XSL and whilst he was copying code from one template into another he inadvertently made the mistake above. Now you’d like to think that when you try to run the XSL through PHP that the invalid markup would throw an error. Well under PHP 5.2.2 on Window’s it doesn’t throw an error – in fact the XSL runs and performs the transformation. However when you run the same XSL under PHP running on Linux it quite rightly throws an error and informs you that the xsl:param is invalid.

I haven’t looked too deeply into why the invalid markup is accepted under Windows, I suspect it might have something to do with the php_xsl.dll that is comes as part of PHP 5.2.2, but it is something that made my jaw drop. Has anyone else experienced this?