xml-dev - Streaming XML back to IE browser problem

["Hanson, Jon" <jhanson@lehman.com>]

I'm working on a servlet which when sent the url of a data file (as a GET
request) will read that file, convert it into our XML equivalent and stream
the XML back to the request originator. The servlet works fine but to test
it i'm using Internet Explorer (5.002314.1003) - the servlet gets the
request, reads the file and sends back the xml ok but the browser strips out
all the tags and just displays the data (if I do view source I see the
well-formed XML as expected). In fact I get exactly the same result if i
rename an zzz.xml file to zzz.html and load it into the browser. This leads
me to think that IE thinks my data is not XML. But in the servlet I am
setting the content type to text/xml and if when the data is incorrectly
displayed in IE I right-click on the background and get the Document
Properties up, it says XML Document.

What I'd like to happen is for IE to recognise the data as XML and to parse
it and display it hierarchically as it would do if i loaded it in from a
text file.

Is this correct behaviour or is it a bug with IE? Is it fixed in later
versions?

Thanks

Jon