431–440 of 559 posts
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.
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I get what you're saying, but following this line of reasoning would mean that successful, wide-spread specifications, standards, and technologies must never drop any features. They would only ever accumulate new features, bloating to the point of uselessness, and die under the weight of their own success.
Nonsense. Following this line of reasoning is that putting percentages on billions is intellectually dishonest: You don't have to go any further than that. It is perhaps out of ignorance (now you know), but if you try to make it about anything else, that's just arguing in bad-faith. Of course you can drop features, but if you work at Google I think you can pick something else, and you'll have a hard time convincing a…
And browsers are too big with too many features; reducing the scope of what a browser does is good (but not enough by itself to remove a feature).
Maybe one day it will come back as a black-box module running in an appropriate sandbox - like I think Firefox uses for PDF rendering.
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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.
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>essentially all the feedback said "no, please don't". And they said "thanks for the feedback, we're gonna do it any way!"? this is a perfectly reasonable course of action if the feedback is "please don't" but the people saying "please don't" aren't people who are actually using it or who can explain why it's necessary. it's a request for feedback, not just a poll.
Well, no; the reasonable course of action is to solicit feedback from the right people instead.
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whatever you do with xslt you can do it in a saner way, but whatever we need to use serial/bluetooth/webgpu/midi for there is no other way, and canvas is massively used.
I'd love to see more powerful HTML templating that'd be able to handle arbitrary XML or JSON inputs, but until we get that, we'll have to make do with XSLT. For now, there's no alternative that allows serving an XML file with the raw data from e.g. an embedded microcontroller in a way that renders a full website in the browser if desired. Even more so if you want to support people downloading the data and viewing it…
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Respectfully, there is nothing baity about that title. The body of that article justifies it. XSLT is only about the last third of it.
These things land differently with different readers, of course, but "Google is killing the open web" does seem pretty baity to me. The combo of grand-claim and something-to-get-mad-about usually is. It doesn't take too large a set of provoked readers to get a large enough set of provoked commenters to bump a thread into flamewar mode.
The way I see it, any general or sweeping accusation against an entity may be construed as clickbait or too provocative for HN, even if the content backs it up sufficiently. But at what point are you going to draw the line where you consider the accusations to be credible enough to warrant such a scathing crticism? It's not as if these entities are renowned for their ethical conduct or even basic decency regarding the commons. Heated public lash back is often the only avenue they leave us. Case in point, I hope you remember the stand that the HN crowd took against WEI. Make no mistake, such discussions here don't go unnoticed. The talking points here often influence the public discourse, including by mass media. That's why there is such a fierce fight to control the narrative here.
I respect your right to your opinion. But this is essentially a political subject. And there is no getting around the fact that you cannot divorce politics from technology, or from any relevant subject for that matter. If that's considered as flame war, then I guess flame wars are an unavoidable and normal part technical discourse. It isn't personal (and no personal attacks should be involved), but the stakes are high enough for the contestants (often of high monetary nature). Attempts to curb such heated discourse will result in two serious consequences. The first is that you will give one or often both sides (ironically), the impression that HN is a place to amplify certain narratives without a balanced take. Secondly, you'll unintentionally and indirectly influence the outcome outside of HN. From my perspective, that leaves you in an unenviable predicament of such serious decisions.
So I implore you to consider these matters as well while taking such decisions. Especially to ensure that your personal biases don't influence what you consider as click and flame baits. From my personal experience, I know that you're putting in the utmost care, diligence and sincerity in those matters. But it's possible that the pressure to avoid controversies, fights and bad blood might have shifted your Overton window too far into the cautious territory over time. Probably a good yard stick is to see if the flamewar is important enough and whether it avoids personal harm (physical and emotional). I hope you'll consider this opinion when you make similar determination in the future. Regards!
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WSL and other VMs are the Year of Desktop Linux finally coming true, nothing to do with Web.
> WSL and other VMs are the Year of Desktop Linux finally coming true, nothing to do with Web. Just like the Linux VM on ChromeOS.
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I get what you're saying, but following this line of reasoning would mean that successful, wide-spread specifications, standards, and technologies must never drop any features. They would only ever accumulate new features, bloating to the point of uselessness, and die under the weight of their own success.
Nonsense. Following this line of reasoning is that putting percentages on billions is intellectually dishonest: You don't have to go any further than that. It is perhaps out of ignorance (now you know), but if you try to make it about anything else, that's just arguing in bad-faith. Of course you can drop features, but if you work at Google I think you can pick something else, and you'll have a hard time convincing a…
Indeed: I learned that you're a condescending ass who doesn't engage with the actual argument I brought up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These things land differently with different readers, of course, but "Google is killing the open web" does seem pretty baity to me. The combo of grand-claim and something-to-get-mad-about usually is. It doesn't take too large a set of provoked readers to get a large enough set of provoked commenters to bump a thread into flamewar mode.
Please take this as a point of discussion rather than as an argument. That title is something that I and many others would have come up with on our own without needing any provocation. In fact, the exact same thing has been said numerous times independently all over the net. There are so many instances that justify the assertion that you could make a very long list with the relevant HN stories alone. But that isn't t…
HN doesn't lack for criticism of the tech BigCos. If it's true that HN influences the public discourse (which I doubt, but let's assume it does), all that influence was gained by being the same HN with the same bookish* titles and preference to avoid flamewars as we're talking about here.
I agree, politics can't be divorced from the topics discussed on HN, and it isn't (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That's not necessarily flamewar, though such topics are more likely to turn flameward.
Yes, many people have the impression that HN is biased, pushing one point of view over another, etc. But people will have that impression regardless. It's in the eye of the beholder, and there are many angry beholders, so we get accused of every bias you can think of. This is baked into the fundamentals of the site.
I don't think moderators' personal tastes are all that intertwined with issues like baity titles. For example, I like Lisp but if someone posted "Lisp crushes its enemies into execrable dust", I'd still edit that title to "Lisp macros provide a high degree of expressiveness" or some representative sentence from the article.
* pg's word about how he wanted the HN frontpage to be