How to open an XML file in Chrome

Open an XML file from a website

Type or paste the address of the file in Chrome’s address bar, then press Enter. When the server sends the file as XML, Chrome displays it by itself, with no extension needed.

In our test, Chromium showed one line at the top of the page: “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.” Below it came the content of the file, element by element, indented to follow its structure.

That message is not an error. It only means that the file does not link to a stylesheet, so Chrome uses its own view. Chrome’s announcement on XSLT says that XML itself is not being removed from the browser, only XSLT. Plain XML files keep this view.

Files that link to an XSL stylesheet are different, and they are the ones affected by the end of XSLT in Chrome. See what breaks when XSLT leaves Chrome.

Open an XML file from your computer

You do not need a web server to read an XML file stored on your computer.

• With the keyboard. In a Chrome window, press Ctrl+O on Windows or Linux, or ⌘+O on a Mac, then select the file. Chrome’s list of keyboard shortcuts gives this as the way to open a file from your computer.
• With the address bar. Type the full path of the file, starting with file:///, for example file:///C:/Users/you/Documents/catalog.xml on Windows.

In our test, a local XML file opened this way showed the same message and the same tree as a file from a website.

There is one exception. When a local XML file links to an XSL stylesheet, Chrome does not apply it. In our test, such a file gave an empty page, while the same stylesheet, served by a web server, was applied. Herong Yang’s notes on local XSL files describe the same blank result in Chrome, with a console message saying that “file:” addresses are treated as unique security origins.

When you see plain text instead of a tree

Chrome decides how to show a file from the content type that the server sends with it, not from the file name. In our test, the same XML file appeared as a tree when it was sent as application/xml or text/xml, but as raw text, all on one line, when it was sent as text/plain.

The same happened to an RSS feed sent with the feed types application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml: Chrome showed its raw text, with no tree. If this is your problem with a feed, see what to do when an RSS feed shows as plain text.

What you can do:

• If it is your own site, have the server send XML files as application/xml or text/xml, the two types that gave a tree in our test.
• If it is someone else’s site, save the file to your computer with an .xml extension, then open it from your computer as shown above.

When Chrome shows an error

If the file is not well-formed XML, Chrome does not show the tree. In our test, a file with a missing closing tag showed this message at the top of the page: “This page contains the following errors: error on line 1 at column 50: Opening and ending tag mismatch: item line 1 and catalog”. It was followed by “Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error.”

The line and column tell you where Chrome stopped reading. The real mistake can be a little earlier. In our example, an item element was never closed, and Chrome only noticed it when it reached the closing tag of catalog, at column 50.

To fix the file, open it in a text or code editor, go to the line given in the message, correct the tag, save, and reload the page in Chrome.

A clearer view with an extension

Chrome’s own view is fine for a quick look. For long files, an extension can help. XMLNest, for example, shows any XML document as a tree you can fold and unfold, where you can search names and values and copy a node, its value or its path. It also has a source view with line numbers, reader views for RSS and Atom feeds and for XML sitemaps, and a clear message with the line and column when a file is broken.

XML files from your computer open in XMLNest once you allow local files. Chrome also asks for one more switch: the “Allow access to file URLs” setting of the extension, on the chrome://extensions page, which Chrome’s developer documentation describes as a setting the user controls for each extension. Like Chrome, XMLNest does not apply a stylesheet to local files: they open in its tree, source and reader views.

For XML pages online that use an XSL stylesheet, see what breaks when XSLT leaves Chrome.