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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"

#441

Post by troupo »

otterley wrote: post #396
troupo wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Chrome telemetry underreports a lot of use cases 2. They have a semi-internal document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS... that explicitly states: small usage percentage doesn't mean you can safely remove a feature --- start quote --- As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in…

Hmm, I don't see the LOC listed here among the top sites: https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... - where are you seeing the Library of Congress as impacted?

This was mentioned in the discussions and are an easy search away. Which means that googlers in their arrogance didn't do any research at all and that their counter underrepresents data as explicitly stated in their own document

https://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-conversions.html

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd_xml...

And then there's Congress: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/

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

#442

Post by dev0001 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #359
jmull wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That same argument applies to numerous web technologies, though. Applied to each individually it seems to make sense. However the aggregate effect is kill off a substantial portion of the web. In fact, it's an argument to never add a new web technology: Should 100% of web users be made vulnerable to bugs in a new technology that 0% of the people are currently using? Plus it's a false dichotomy. They could instead add…

depends entirely on which technologies are acctively addressing current and future vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities associated with native client-side XSLT are not in the language itself (XSLT 1.0) but instead are caused by bugs in the browser implementations.

Ps. The XSLT language is actively maintained and is used in many applications and contexts outside of the browser.

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

#443

Post by troupo »

bawolff wrote: post #221
jchw wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do Library of Congress and Congress count as significant usage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958929

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

#444

Post by troupo »

mr_toad wrote: post #286
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?

WhatWG has a fairly well documented process for feature requests. Issues are not usually decided in closed meetings. But there’s a difference between constructive discussion and the stubborn shameless entitlement that some members of the community are displaying in their comments. https://blog.whatwg.org/staged-proposals-at-the-whatwg

No. WhatWG only has a process for adding and approving features.

It has no process for discussing removal of features or for speaking out against a feature

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

#445

Post by troupo »

cyanydeez wrote: post #357
bawolff wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Citation needed] Seriously, i doubt this.

I secondly doubt this. Would love a succinct list of "important" websites.

Do Library of Congress and Congress count? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958929

It's not for the public to identify these sites. It's for the arrogant Googlers to do a modicum of research

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

#446

Post by troupo »

Shebanator wrote: post #227
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…

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.

> but Google somehow should have infinite resources to maintain things forever?

Google adds 1000+ new APIs to the web platform a year. They are expected to be supported nearly forever. They have no qualms adding those.

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

#447

Post by troupo »

notatoad wrote: post #188
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…

>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.

Google's own document says numbers don't show the full picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44956267

They didn't even do the tiniest bit of research, as people in the discussions clearly showed, and there are high impact sites that would be affected by this including Congress and Library of Congress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958929

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

#448

Post by troupo »

adwn wrote: post #302
geocar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [0] ~0.001% usage according to one post there This is still a massive number of people who are going to be affected by this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44938747

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.

> must never drop any features

On the web? That's about right. See Google's own document on this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

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

#449

Post by troupo »

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.

> and it sounds like they want it to contain zero template engines.

The funny thing? No, they want to create a new one: https://github.com/WICG/webcomponents/issues/1069

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

#450

Post by troupo »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #95

Oh hey, that thing happened that one could easily see was going to happen [0]. The writing was on the wall for XSL as soon as the browsers tore out FTP support: their desire to minimize attack surface trumps any tendency to leave well enough alone. I wonder what the next step of removing less-popular features will be. Probably the SMIL attributes in favor of CSS for SVG animations, they've been grumbling about those…

> their desire to minimize attack surface trumps any tendency to leave well enough alone.

It's that why Chrome unilaterally releases 1000+ web APIs a year, many of them quite complex, and spanning a huge range of things to go wrong (including access to USB, serial devices etc.)? To reduce the attack surface?

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