Viewing USPTO XML patent specifications in non-Microsoft browsers

One of the first things a person notices when using ABX 1.1 and ePave 5.1d is that the USPTO software seems rather wedded to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Attempts to view an XML application-body with a non-Microsoft browser will fail, often leading simply to a blank screen. (Even if you use Internet Explorer the viewing can fail due to versions of DLLs used for displaying XML. See this article to learn how to fix that problem.)

List member Benjamin Lee has investigated this problem and has found that its cause is within the style sheet provided with ABX 1.1. Here are his comments:

I don't know whether anyone would be interested in this, but I have fixed some errors in the XSL style sheet "us-application-body.xsl" that prevented it from working on browsers other than Internet Explorer. The fix does nothing to change the way Internet Explorer will render the XML.

If you try to display an XML patent application on a browser such as Mozilla, Netscape, or Thunderbird, what you would get with the old XSL style sheet would be a completely blank screen. Using my version of the XSL style sheet, the xml documents should now display correctly. I would really encourage the Patent Office to include my fix in the next software release, if only because it will allow the use of XML-compliant browsers other than Internet Explorer to view the specification.

Here is the original style sheet (which is dated July 7, 2004) and here is Benjamin Lee's version of the style sheet.

There are two different ways you could imagine using this improved style sheet -- one-time use and automatic use.

For one-time use, you could export XML and PDF from an ABX 1.1 project, and then find the style sheet in the project folder into which ABX 1.1 copied the thirty standard files. Replace the July 7, 2004 style sheet with the improved one. This will permit you to open the XML application-body with any of a number of web browsers other than Internet Explorer. This has the advantage that it does not affect the ABX zip file that will be sent to the USPTO by means of ePave 5.1d. This has the disadvantage that you would have to perform these steps all over again each time you author an application-body.

For automatic use, you could imaging coping the revised style sheet into "C:\Program Files\USPTO\ABX\DTD". This is the folder from which ABX 1.1 copies the thirty standard files whenever it exports XML from an ABX document. What's interesting about the latter approach is that it would cause the revised style sheet (rather than the original style sheet) to be included in the ABX zip file. But as it turns out, ePave 5.1d apparently checks to see if the style sheet included in the zip file matches some reference document. A validation error will occur from the ePave 5.1d client if the match fails and ePave will refuse to send the package to the USPTO.