Google Did Not Unilaterally Decide to Kill Xslt

Also also also: Really sorry, it's Pavlovian.

But the argument is mostly irrelevant here. This is a web platform feature. One of the defining characteristics of the web platform is to be very conservative with backwards compatibility. This has nothing to do with it being OSS.

As opposed to non-OSS, where removing features that paying customers care about is of course trivial?

> Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I don't mindless comic and its original context, but it's gotten extremely old seeing it wheeled out to justify completely discarding user input on any change. Sometimes an update does break legitimate workflows, and that is bad.

onunload: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-u...

Mutation events (replaced by MutationObserver): https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mutation-events-deprecatio...

FTP URLs: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deps-rems-95#ftp_support_r...

Here's useful documentation on their process, which they sometimes call Chrome Variations and sometimes Origin Trials: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/chrome-variat...

Outside of web browsers, i think X11 is somewhat famous for this sort of thing.

5. Funny that we are talking about "info that leaks to the public" when we are discussing standards that may be important to billions of people, as if keeping things private was reasonable.

- The thread by the Chromium dev proposed what was originally a 1MB minified polyfill for the Javascript only XSLT calls that in just the last few days has grown to 3MB minified. XSLT was beneficial in the browser because it was native, while a 3MB polyfill is a rather big ask to suggest as a per-site replacement for anything meant to be snappy on slower connections.

- It seems from various mentions the catalysts for this to surface now were the sole maintainer for the XSLT library used in Chromium expressed having trouble maintaining it some months back and left it to a different sole maintainer, along with a recently disclosed vulnerability in that particular library. Firefox OTOH is said to use a different XSLT library.

- Chromium team routinely awards vulnerability discovery bounties in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just the other week they awarded $250k to an author who discovered a tricky Chromium exploit. I'd be curious if they've funded development of the XSLT library they use in the past as it seems like they'd rather just be rid of it.

- Within days of posting the open question to the working group and a week prior to the PR of the spec removal a Chromium ticket by the author set milestones for XSLT removal in Chromium. It seems it's less a tentative proposal and more leading by example.

One of the things I learned about Google during the AMP4Email fiasco is that the standards-development folks there... do not know the word no. There is no process to tell them that something should not be done. If you do, you broke the code of conduct, because they're Googlers and they Know Better. People like Mason Freed in the XSLT thread are sad that people trying to tell him no are getting in the way of him talking to people who will tell him yes.

At the point where the courts have determined that Google abuses it's monopoly control of the web, honestly, there's a question why Google is involved in standards-setting as opposed to being relegated to an advisory position required to implement standards as-designed by everyone else.

Like HN isn't on these type of topics. Just an hour ago you said that they're trying to kill XSLT because it "not a tool for surveillance capitalism"[1]. A claim made completely unencumbered by any evidence, of course. It's little more than a nonsensical conspiracy theory.

There's a reason all the major browsers are kind of on-board with this, just like there's a reason it never got updated much beyond XSLT 1. If XSLT would be proposed today, adding it to browsers would be a complete non-starter. Newer browsers like Servo or Ladybird have not even mentioned XSLT as near as I can find. It's very low low on their priority list, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people working on those browsers would prefer to not implement it at all.

The funny thing about people stuck in echo chambers is that they cannot comprehend how anyone could disagree with them, so then they reach to conspiracy theories to "explain" this, completely ignoring all the technical arguments.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988418

There is really no winning for them. They weren't even the party who proposed removing xslt.

1. "Play Nice": Browser vendors are trying to do what’s right for the web with budgets that are substantially outside their control. But browser vendors have the right to control their budgets, and to make decisions about what features to support or not to support. Web developers have to persuade browser vendors in order to get what they want; they have no special moral rights here. It is both practical and ethical to treat browser vendors politely, and not to rudely shame them.

(Eric Meyer's blog post here is firmly in the "Play Nice" point of view. "Google has trillions of dollars," he writes. "The Chrome team very much does not.")

2. "Fight the Power": Browser vendors are in a position of power, and that creates a moral responsibility to web developers. Their budgets are substantially within their control, and if their moral duty requires them to spend more on browser development, then that’s what duty requires. Frequently, browser vendors will try to shirk their duty to web developers in order to manage their budgets; this is always wrong, every time they do it.

There are two sub-bullets under "Fight the Power."

2a. When browser vendors shirk their responsibility, we all have a duty to shame the ones doing it in a noisy protest, not because that’s a practical way to persuade browser vendors, but because protesting/shaming wrongdoers in positions of power is ethical for its own sake.

2b. Browser vendors will try to shield themselves from protests by putting “code of conduct” rules in place against protesting/shaming them, especially against personal attacks. But it’s unethical for browser vendors (actors in a position of power) to enforce a code of conduct that prevents powerless web devs from shaming them, so the code of conduct should be protested, too; browser vendors should furthermore be shamed for having a code of conduct that interferes with the right/duty of web devs to protest shameful behavior. At a minimum, web devs should non-violently resist the code of conduct by actively violating it, and by shaming browser vendors for trying to enforce it.

I think the majority point of view here on HN is "Fight the Power." Google's up to no good, again, huh? Then we've all gotta shame them into doing the right thing again with a righteous flame war, no holds barred, including direct personal attacks. ("Should Mason Freed be removed from web standards?")

And if they try to delete/suppress our flamey personal-attack posts calling out their shameful behavior, why, that's even more shameful, and we've gotta call that out, too.

I think both points of view are reasonable. The problem is when people don't even realize that the other point of view exists.

FTP needed to be torn down. It’s sad, but true. There was no reason for anyone to be using it past 2010 - and in fact many reasons actively against using it

I don't think using one set of technologies as compared to another one can really be said to make one a "real" web developer. Real web developers are developers who put sites on the web, there is no benefit to anyone to be had claiming one choice is "real" and therefore the other choices are lesser-than.

Put it this way: whatever set of constraints you used to arrive at that decision does not apply to every situation, and when you frame things through the lens where you implicitly disregard that oh-so-obvious truth, it's hard for anyone to interpret your analysis as anything but myopic in the best case and actively self-serving and destructive in the worst case. It's nearly impossible to read through someone speaking this way about a topic and believe their analysis is objective, comprehensive, or without obvious bias, even if it may actually be all of those things.

   customElements.define(
     "html-include",
     class extends HTMLElement {
       connectedCallback() {
         fetch(this.getAttribute("href"))
           .then((response) => response.text())
           .then((text) => (this.innerHTML = text))}});

(And I'm counting agreement between the handful of browser vendors as unilateral decisions as well. The group is not exactly very large)

The second part was basically the author saying "calm down guys, relax, there is a process." - and then speculating what that process might be.

If there is an orderly, public process that is being followed here, that includes a time and place for community feedback, shouldn't you be able to read up on it somewhere instead of speculating?

We could remove framesets and remove var from javascript. Remove the Date object now that there is a Temporal api. Remove tables and flexbox now that there is grid. xhr can go too now that we have fetch. The <center> tag isn't needed anymore. I'm sure we can find support from people disliking onclick and onsomething attributes. Or how about hoisting? Surely we can simply rm that? Removing things doesn't have to be limited to older things. asm.js and web workers weren't really necessary at all.

I'm fountain of good ideas.

With XSLT in a browser I can throw some static XML and XSLT files on any web server and they will Just Work™ and be usable without me having to do much other than telling the web server to serve index.xml instead of index.html. If I have to learn how to set up and maintain a proxy server so visitors to my site can still view the rendered pages, then I probably won't bother.

> XLST is a really weird feature and it seems sensible to drop it

What's weird about it? It lets me mark up some text using whatever XML makes sense to me and then write a template that the browser uses to transform it into (X)HTML that it can display. For someone who builds basic sites, it's an easy way to do templating that doesn't involve me setting up a 'real' programming environment

Not dead. I read HN using their feed!

This is what happens when you have a monopoly.