Cecil Ward

I have a problem with Windows Vista.

I have a lot of text files that have the extension .xsl. Most indexed
searches on these files fail, presumably because these files are not treated
_as text_ and so are put through some kind of content filter.

My question: I can't see any way to change this behaviour, because the
options are grayed out?

(Although under WinXp I was able to customize the behaviour of Windows
Desktop Search to fix this problem.)


This is what seems to be happening: I note that the extension .xsl is
treated as being mapped to .xml (not totally unreasonably). I get the feeling
that XML files, including .xsl files and various other types, are put
through some kind of filter that actually parses the XML and only extracts
just the contents of _text nodes_ in XML.

This kind of treatment for XML (and presumably HTML) might be appropriate
for _some_ users, but is completely useless for developers whose view of XML,
XSLT and HTML documents is (probably) that of "document as source-text file".
I simply can't search the contents of XSLT sources!

This "only one view for everyone" approach is I suggest a weakness in the
design of the indexed search. It seems to me that future products should have
a per-user "source or filtered view" for these types.


--
Cecil Ward