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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"

#131

Post by CheeseFromLidl »

mlinhares wrote: post #99
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…

After the XML madness whenever I see some tech being hyped and used all over the place I remember the days of XML and ignore it.

I was quite fond of DokuWiki’s xml-rpc. Probably long replaced now but it was a godsend to have a simple rpc to the server from within javascript. (2007)

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

#132

Post by codedokode »

dehrmann wrote: post #114
codedokode wrote: post #68

This is actually not a bad idea. Why should the browser contain a specific template engine, like XSLT, and not Jinja for example? Also it can be reimplemented using JS or WASM. The browsers today are too bloated and it is difficult to create a new browser engine. I wish there were simpler standards for "minimal browser", for example, supporting only basic HTML tags, basic layout rules, WASM and Java bytecode. Many th…

> Why should the browser contain a specific template engine, like XSLT, and not Jinja for example? Historic reasons, and it sounds like they want it to contain zero template engines. You could transpile a subset of Jinja or Mustache to XSLT, but no one seems to do it or care.

Adding XSLT support is as absurd as adding React into a browser (especially given that it's change detection is inefficient and requires lot of computation). Instead, browsers should provide better change tracking methods for JS objects.

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

#133

Post by kg »

spankalee wrote: post #92

A few things to note: - This isn't Chrome doing this unilaterally. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 shows that representatives from every browser are supportive and there have been discussions about this in standards meetings: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11146#issuecomment-275... - You can see from the WHATNOT meeting agenda that it was a Mozilla engineer who brought it up last time. - Opening a…

Former Mozilla and Google (Chrome team specifically) dev here. The way I see what you're saying is: Representatives from Chrome/Blink, Safari/Webkit, and Firefox/Gecko are all supportive of removing XSLT from the web platform, regardless of whether it's still being used. It's okay because someone from Mozilla brought it up.

Out of those three projects, two are notoriously under-resourced, and one is notorious for constantly ramming through new features at a pace the other two projects can't or won't keep up with.

Why wouldn't the overworked/underresourced Safari and Firefox people want an excuse to have less work to do?

This appeal to authority doesn't hold water for me because the important question is not 'do people with specific priorities think this is a good idea' but instead 'will this idea negatively impact the web platform and its billions of users'. Out of those billions of users it's quite possible a sizable number of them rely on XSLT, and in my reading around this issue I haven't seen concrete data supporting that nobody uses XSLT. If nobody really used it there wouldn't be a need for that polyfill.

Fundamentally the question that should be asked here is: Billions of people use the web every day, which means they're relying on technologies like HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc. Are we okay with breaking something that 0.1% of users rely on? If we are, okay, but who's going to tell that 0.1% of a billion people that they don't matter?

The argument I've seen made is that Google doesn't have the resources (somehow) to maintain XSLT support. One of the googlers argued that new emerging web APIs are more popular, and thus more deserving of resources. So what we've created is a zero-sum game where any new feature added to the platform requires the removal of an existing feature. Where does that game end? Will we eventually remove ARIA and/or screen reader support because it's not used by enough people?

I think all three browser vendors have a duty to their users to support them to the best of their ability, and Google has the financial and human resources to support users of XSLT and is choosing not to.

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

#134

Post by jeroenhd »

troupo wrote: post #63
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…

> I also don't really understand the complaint from the Chrome people that are proposing it: "it's too complex, high-profile bugs, here's a polyfill you can use". Especially considering the amount of complex standards they have qualms about from WebUSB to 20+ web components standards > On the other hand, I don't normally view RSS feeds manually. Chrome metrics famously underrepresent corporate installation. There cou…

My guess is that they're fine with WebBluetooth/USB/FileSystem/etc. because the code for the new standard is recent and sticks with modern security sensibilities.

XSLT (and basically anything else that existed when HTML5 turned ten years old) is old code using old quality standards and old APIs that still need to be maintained. Browsers can rewrite them to be all new and modern, but it's a job very few people are interested in (and Google's internal structure heavily prioritizes developing new things over maintaining old stuff).

Nobody is making a promotion by modernizing the XSLT parser. Very few people even use XSLT in their day to day, and the biggest product of the spec is a competitor to at least three of the four major browser manufacturers.

XSLT is an example of exciting tech that failed. WebSerial is exciting tech that can still prove itself somehow.

The corporate installations still doing XSLT will get stuck running an LTS browser like they did with IE11 and the many now failed strains of technology that still supports (anyone remember ActiveX?).

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

#135

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

codedokode wrote: post #68

This is actually not a bad idea. Why should the browser contain a specific template engine, like XSLT, and not Jinja for example? Also it can be reimplemented using JS or WASM. The browsers today are too bloated and it is difficult to create a new browser engine. I wish there were simpler standards for "minimal browser", for example, supporting only basic HTML tags, basic layout rules, WASM and Java bytecode. Many th…

I kind of agree that little used,[0] non-web-like features is fair to be considered for removal. However I wish they didn't hide behind security vulnerabilities as the reason as that clearly wasn't it. The author didn't even bother to look if a memory safe package existed. "We're removing this for your own good" is the worst way to go about it but he still doubles down on this idea later in the thread.

[0] ~0.001% usage according to one post there

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

#136

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Another fellow soul!

My first rewrite of my site, as I moved it away from Yahoo, into my own domain was also in XSLT/XML.

Eventually I got tired of keeping it that way, and rewrite the parsing and HTML generation into PHP, but kept the site content in XML, to this day.

Every now and then I think about rewriting it, but I rather do native development outside work, and don't suffer from either PHP nor XML allergies.

Doing declarative programming in XSLT was cool though.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by arccy »

redwall_hp wrote: post #88
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."

the old sages in ivory towers handed us a spec engraved in stone and expected is to live by it

no wonder they were sidelined

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

#139

Post by School-Cotton »

devmor wrote: post #51
ksec wrote: post #40

Do we know Webkit, KHTML and Gecko's stand on this? I know this is for security reason but why not update the XSLT implementation instead. And if feature that aren't used get dropped, they might as well do it all in one good. I am sure lots of HTML spec aren't even used.

If it was just for security reasons, they could sponsor FOSS development on the implementation. I am of the opinion that it is to remove one of the last ways to build web applications that don't have advertising and tracking injected into them.

> I am of the opinion that it is to remove one of the last ways to build web applications that don't have advertising and tracking injected into them.

Er, how so? What stops you from doing so in HTML/JS/CSS ?

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