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"Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

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Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#81

Post by eszed »

kccqzy wrote: post #59
coldpie wrote: post #26

I have no opinion on this, just sharing my one-and-only XSLT story. My first job in software was as a software test development intern at a ~500 employee non-profit, in about 2008 when I was about 19 or 20 years old. Writing software to test software. One of my tasks during the 2 years I worked there was to write documentation for their XML test data format. The test data was written in XML documents, then run throug…

My XSLT story: I wrote my personal website in XML with XSLT transforming into something viewable in the browser circa 2008. I was definitely inspired by CSS Zen Garden where the same HTML gave drastically different presentation with different CSS, but I thought that was too restrictive with too much overly tricky CSS. I thought the code would be more maintainable by writing XSLT transforms for different themes of my…

Ha! Shout out to CSS Zen Garden. I didn't go as far down the rabbit hole as you did (noped out before XSLT made its way into my mix), but around that time I made sure all of my html was valid XML (er, XHTML), complete with the little validation badge at the bottom of the page. 80:20 form to content ratio sounds about right.

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#82

Post by icedchai »

raincole wrote: post #28
icedchai wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think we got into this mess in the first place? First it was Netscape, then Microsoft, now Google.

Yet, the web has been prospering for two decades in spite of the quasi-monopoly state of browsers. It's the living evidence that the dominant browser vendor doesn't has as much power as people imagine.

More like three decades, but I get your point. ;) I remember running Netscape 0.9 something back in 1994.

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#83

Post by lucb1e »

4ndrewl wrote: post #72
lucb1e wrote: post #32

I had no idea what XSLT even was until today. Reading the submission, the thread linked by u/troupo below, and Wikipedia, I find that it's apparently used in RSS parsing by browsers, because RSS is XML and then XSLT is "originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents" so it can turn the XML feed into an HTML page I agree RSS parsing is nice to have built into browsers. (Just like FTP suppo…

XSLT was the blockchain, nft, metaverse of the mid?-2000s. Was totally going to solve all of our problems.

I thought XML was that big hype, not XSLT. That I somehow never saw mentioned that you can do actual webpages and other useful stuff with it is probably why I never understood why people thought XML was so useful ^^' I thought it was just another data format like JSON or CSV, and we might as well have written HTML as {"body":{"p":"Hello, World!"}} and that it's just serendipity that XML was earlier

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#84

Post by [deleted] »

maratc wrote: post #77
nicce wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why flagged? The post was reasonable.

Probably labeling a removal of a format (which is somewhat niche anyway) as "killing the open web" was a bit hyperbolic and not entirely warranted in this case. Imagine that tomorrow, Google announces plans to stop supporting HTML and move everyone to its own version of "CompuServe", delivered only via Google Fiber and accessible only with Google Chrome. What headline would you suggest for that occasion? " Google is…

[deleted]

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#85

Post by michaelt »

meindnoch wrote: post #57
raincole wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the web has been prospering for two decades in spite of the quasi-monopoly state of browsers. It's the living evidence that the dominant browser vendor doesn't has as much power as people imagine.

The web has been prospering?

Obviously not things like blogs, or things you’d find via search, or independent forums, or newspaper websites. They certainly aren’t prospering.

But walled gardens like YouTube, Discord, ChatGPT and suchlike that are delivered via the browser are prospering. And as a cross platform GUI system, html is astonishingly popular.

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#86

Post by Spivak »

ummonk wrote: post #47
hypeatei wrote: post #20

This proposal seems to be aimed at removing native support in favor of a WASM-based polyfill (like PDF.js, I guess) which seems reasonable? Google definitely throws its weight around too much w.r.t. to web standards, but this doesn't seem too bad. Web specifications are huge and complex so trying to size down a little bit while maintaining support for existing sites is okay IMO.

No, that would indeed be reasonable, but the proposal is to remove XSLT from the standard and remove Chrome support for XSLT entirely, forcing websites to adopt the polyfill themselves.

Which is, to me, silly. If you ship the polyfill then there's no discussion to be had. It works just the same as it always has for users and it's as secure as V8, no aging native codebase with memory corruption bugs to worry about.

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#87

Post by cluckindan »

meindnoch wrote: post #57
raincole wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, the web has been prospering for two decades in spite of the quasi-monopoly state of browsers. It's the living evidence that the dominant browser vendor doesn't has as much power as people imagine.

The web has been prospering?

What is Google? Or Amazon?

I’m sure you can come up with more examples of extremely high value business which would not have happened without the web.

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#88

Post by redwall_hp »

varbhat wrote: post #4

i thought that HTML spec is immutable.

The W3C spec was. But WHATWG and HTML5 represent a coup by the dominant browser corporations (read: Google). The biggest browser dictates the "living standard" and the W3C is forced into a descriptivist role.

The W3C's plan was for HTML4 to be replaced by XHTML. What we commonly call HTML5 is the WHATWG "HTML Living Standard."

Re: "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"

#90

Post by bogwog »

raincole wrote: post #28
icedchai wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think we got into this mess in the first place? First it was Netscape, then Microsoft, now Google.

Yet, the web has been prospering for two decades in spite of the quasi-monopoly state of browsers. It's the living evidence that the dominant browser vendor doesn't has as much power as people imagine.

> prospering

Like 90%+ of internet traffic goes to a handful of sites owned by tech giants. Most of what's left is SEO garbage serving those same tech giants' ad networks.

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