The message “The XML page cannot be displayed. Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.” was displayed instead. The feed did however work fine in other web browsers that we tested immediately including Mozilla Firefox.

This led to the conclusion that the error had to be Internet Explorer specific. It could have been a plugin that was running on the website itself, some incompatible code in the theme that was causing Internet Explorer 8 to throw that error message or a problem at the hoster of the feed Feedburner.

The first thing that came to my mind was to validate the feed using an official resource like the Feed Validation Service at W3C. This service validates a feed and displays validation errors and warnings including their location in the code. One error was displayed: Your feed is not well formed according to the XML specification

It turned out that one of the articles published lately contained the char & which was responsible for the feed validation error and the error in Internet Explorer 8.

Escaping that character with & a m p ; (remove the spaces) was the solution that fixed the error. The feed did validate correctly afterwards (after the new article had been cached by the feed hosting service) and Internet Explorer 8 was displaying the feed correctly.

This does mean however that webmasters have to always escape certain characters in the articles that they publish on their websites if they want their feed to be working in Internet Explorer 8.

This is actually not the fault of Internet Explorer 8. The web browser is strictly following the rules in this case. It’s time to look for a plugin that will automatically escape those chars so that the feed will validate and display correctly in Internet Explorer 8.