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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"

#221

Post by bawolff »

jchw wrote: post #209
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?

I think it depends on the spec. Some of the working groups still have mailing lists, some of them have GitHub issues. To be completely honest, though, I'm not sure what people expect to get out of it. I dug into this a while ago for a rather silly reason and I found that it's very inside baseball, and unless you really wanted to get invested in it it seems like it'd be hard to meaningfully contribute. To be honest if…

If people are upset about xslt being removed, step 1 would have been to actually use it in a significant way on the web. Step 2 would have been to volunteer to maintain libxslt.

Everyone likes to complain as a user of open source. Nobody likes to do the difficult work.

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

#222

Post by dragonwriter »

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,

XSLT is a templating language (like HTML is a content language), not a template engine like Blink or WebKit is a browser engine.

> Also it can be reimplemented using JS or WASM.

Changing the implementation wouldn't involve taking the language out of the web platform. There wouldn't need to be any standardization talk about changing the implementation used in one or more browsers.

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

#223

Post by spankalee »

Y_Y wrote: post #19

> @whatwg whatwg locked as too heated and limited conversation to collaborators Too heated? Looked pretty civil and reasonable to me. Would it be ridiculous to suggest that the tolerance for heat might depend on how commenters are aligned with respect to a particular vendor?

FYI, I heard that it was Apple employees who administer that repo that marked those comments as off topic and locked the thread, but people are attributing that to the Google employee that opened the issue.

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

#224

Post by NoGravitas »

jopsen wrote: post #206
spankalee wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at this is: Billions of people use the web every day. Should the 99.99% of them be vulnerable to XSLT security bugs for the other 0.01%?

Isn't this something that could be implemented using javascript? I don't think anyone is arguing that XSLT has to be fast. You could probably compile libxslt to wasm, run it when loading xml with xslt, and be done. Does XSLT affect the DOM after processing, isn't it just a dumb preprocessing step, where the render xhtml is what becomes the DOM.

It could be. The meaningful argument is over whether the javascript polyfill should be built into the browser (in which case, browser support remains the same as it ever was, they just swap out a fast but insecure implementation for a slow but secure one), or whether site operators, principally podcast hosts, should be required to integrate it into their sites and serve it.

The first strategy is obviously correct, but Google wants strategy 2.

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

#225

Post by NoGravitas »

solardev wrote: post #208
kg wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bring back VRML! Seriously though, if I were forced to maintain every tiny legacy feature in a 20 year old app... I'd also become a "former" dev :) Even in its heyday, XSLT seemed like an afterthought. Probably there are a handful of legacy corporate users hanging on to it for dear life. But if infinitely more popular techs (like Flash or FTP or non HTTPS sites) can be deprecated without much fuss... I don't think XS…

> Probably there are a handful of legacy corporate users hanging on to it for dear life.

Like more or less everyone that hosts podcasts. But the current trend is for podcast feeds to go away, and be subsumed into Spotify and YouTube.

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

#226

Post by layer8 »

sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #216
kg wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Representatives from Chrome/Blink, Safari/Webkit, and Firefox/Gecko are all supportive of removing XSLT Did anybody bother checking with Microsoft? XML/XSLT is very enterprisey and this will likely break a lot of intranet (or $$$ commercial) applications. Secondly, why is Firefox/Gecko given full weight for their vote when their marketshare is dwindling into irrelevancy? It's the equivalent of the crazy cat hoarder…

There are countries like Germany where Firefox still has around 10% market share [0], or closer to 20% on the desktop, only second behind Chrome [1]. Not exactly irrelevant.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/germany

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/germ...

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

#227

Post by Shebanator »

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…

So the Safari developers are overworked/under-resourced, but Google somehow should have infinite resources to maintain things forever? Apple is a much bigger company than Google these days, so why shouldn't they also have these infinite resources? Oh, right, its because fundamentally they don't value their web browser as much as they should. But you give them a pass.

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

#228

Post by NoGravitas »

93po wrote: post #154
kg wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I see "reps from every browser agree" my bullshit alarm immediately goes off. Does it include unanimous support from browser projects that are either: 1. not trillion dollar tech companies or 2. not 99% funded from a trillion dollar tech company. I have long suspected that Google gives so much money to Mozilla both for the default search option, but also for massive indirect control to deliberately cripple Mozil…

The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

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

#229

Post by tomComb »

spystath wrote: post #44
tomComb wrote: post #7

Chrome is a browser – it can’t remove something from the spec. Perhaps this should say Google proposes to remove it from the spec.

Chrome is the dominant browser. Sad as this may be removing it from Blink means de facto removing it from the spec. That being said, I'm not against removing features but neither this or the original post provide any substantial rationale on why it should be removed. Uses for XSLT do exist and the alternative is "just polyfill it" which is awkward especially for legacy content.

But a browser doesn’t have agency – it’s Google that is doing this.

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

#230

Post by lukan »

sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #216
kg wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Representatives from Chrome/Blink, Safari/Webkit, and Firefox/Gecko are all supportive of removing XSLT Did anybody bother checking with Microsoft? XML/XSLT is very enterprisey and this will likely break a lot of intranet (or $$$ commercial) applications. Secondly, why is Firefox/Gecko given full weight for their vote when their marketshare is dwindling into irrelevancy? It's the equivalent of the crazy cat hoarder…

"Secondly, why is Firefox/Gecko given full weight for their vote when their marketshare is dwindling into irrelevancy?"

There was not really a vote in the first place and FF is still dependant on google. Otherwise FF (users) represants a vocal and somewhat influental minority, capable of creating shitstorms, if the pain level is high enough.

Personally, I always thought XSLT is somewhat weird, so I never used it. Good choice in hindsight.

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