"Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec" • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by webstrand » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #113

So if in reading the two threads correctly essentially Google asked for feedback, essentially all the feedback said "no, please don't". And they said "thanks for the feedback, we're gonna do it any way!"? The other suggestions ignored seemed to be "if this is about security, then fund the OSS, project. Or swap to a newer safer library, or pull it into the JS sandbox and ensure support is maintained." Which were all m…

It would be incredible if we could pull it into the javascript/wasm sandbox and get xslt 3.0 support. The best of both worlds, at the cost of a performance hit on those pages, but not a terrible cost.

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

#192

Post by spankalee » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #185

spankalee wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 (Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?) is not a request for community feedback. It's an issue open on the HTML spec for the HTML spec maintainers to consider. It was opened by a Chrome engineer after at least two meetings where a Mozilla engineer raised the topic, and where there was apparently vendor support for it. This is happening after some serious exploi…

I think this discussion is quite reasonable, but it also highlights the power imbalance: If this stuff is decided in closed meetings and the bug trackers are not supposed to be places for community feedback, where can the community influence such decisions?

Community feedback is usually very ad hoc. Platform PMs will work with major sites, framework maintainers, and sometimes do discussions and polls on social sites. IOW, they try to go where the community that uses the features are, rather than stay on GitHub in the spec issues.

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

#193

Post by anon84873628 » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

kg wrote: post #133

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 con…

>who's going to tell that 0.1% of a billion people that they don't matter?

This is also not a fair framing. There are lots of good reasons to deprecate a technology, and it doesn't mean the users don't matter. As always, technology requires tradeoffs (as does the "common good", usually.)

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

#194

Post by codedokode » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

geocar wrote: post #175

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…

> This is actually not a bad idea. Why should the browser contain a specific template engine, like XSLT XSLT is a specification for a "template engine" and not a specific engine. There are dozens of XSLT implementations. Mozilla notably doesn't use libxslt but transformiix: https://web.mit.edu/ghudson/dev/nokrb/third/firefox/extensio... > and not Jinja for example? Jinja operates on text, so it's basically document.w…

> I've been looking at it as a secret weapon: I've been using it for the last twenty years because it's faster than everything else.

Serving a server-generated HTML page could be even faster.

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

#195

Post by danans » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

nativeit wrote: post #162

pjmlp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web is for all practical purposes ChromeOS, but then people complain about Apple not playing ball.

> ChromeOS is for all practical purposes, the web. Fixed that typo for you.

> > ChromeOS is for all practical purposes, the web

I'm very practically using Debian Linux on ChromeOS to develop test and debug enterprise software. I even compile and run some native code. It is very much more than just the web.

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

#196

Post by krapp » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #183

krapp wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a consequence of javascript being "good enough." Originally, the goal was for the web to support multiple languages (I think one prototype of the tag had a "type=text/tcl") and IE supported VBScript for a while. But at the end of the day, you only really need one, and the type attribute was phased out of the script tag entirely, and Javascript won.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... It is actively used today.

Fair enough. Its use to denote other scripting languages was phased out.

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

#197

Post by mx7zysuj4xew » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

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.

Xslt actually solved a lot of problems for me last week in processing json to relational data

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

#198

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

spankalee wrote: post #192

xg15 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this discussion is quite reasonable, but it also highlights the power imbalance: If this stuff is decided in closed meetings and the bug trackers are not supposed to be places for community feedback, where can the community influence such decisions?

Community feedback is usually very ad hoc. Platform PMs will work with major sites, framework maintainers, and sometimes do discussions and polls on social sites. IOW, they try to go where the community that uses the features are, rather than stay on GitHub in the spec issues.

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by insin » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #113

So if in reading the two threads correctly essentially Google asked for feedback, essentially all the feedback said "no, please don't". And they said "thanks for the feedback, we're gonna do it any way!"? The other suggestions ignored seemed to be "if this is about security, then fund the OSS, project. Or swap to a newer safer library, or pull it into the JS sandbox and ensure support is maintained." Which were all m…

Google tells you what they're going to do to the web with a question mark on the end.

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

#200

Post by sieabahlpark » Tue, Aug 19, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #185

spankalee wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 (Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?) is not a request for community feedback. It's an issue open on the HTML spec for the HTML spec maintainers to consider. It was opened by a Chrome engineer after at least two meetings where a Mozilla engineer raised the topic, and where there was apparently vendor support for it. This is happening after some serious exploi…

I think this discussion is quite reasonable, but it also highlights the power imbalance: If this stuff is decided in closed meetings and the bug trackers are not supposed to be places for community feedback, where can the community influence such decisions?

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