Why we need to set resolveExternals to "true" when upgrading system form window XP SP

Recently I upgraded my system from window XP SP2 to SP3.



The client side application code has JavaScript that makes use of MSXML3

Something like this :

var xslDoc = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument");

xslDoc.async = false;

xslDoc.resolveExternals = false;

xslDoc.load("gridRendererColumnLayout.xsl");



//create the xslt processor.

var xslt = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.XSLTemplate");

xslt.stylesheet = xslDoc;



You can see above I have set resolveExternals to false, however the xls file (gridRendererColumnLayout.xsl) I have used as my stylesheet make reference to some other .xls file using <xls:include > syntax



The part of my gridRendererColumnLayout.xsl looks something like this

……………..

………………

<xsl:include href="common.xsl"/>

<xsl:include href="descriptor.xsl"/>



Prior to windows XP SP3 security patch upgrade my application was working properly without any issue however post upgrade to SR 3 some security updates got installed because of which my application is not working properly.



When I searched through the net I found out that for MSXML version 3 , in order to reference external file we need to set resolveExternals to ‘true ‘so I modified my code by changing it to xslDoc.resolveExternals = true and it worked fine ; Post this change the application is working fine even resolveExternals set to false .



Please can someone help in as to

1] Why prior to security update even when the resolveExternals attribute was set to false the external reference was working fine and also the application?

2] Why the application is currently working only when resolveExternals is set to ‘true’?



Thanks for your help.



Thanks

Mohanraj