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Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

developer.chrome.com

11–20 of 352 posts

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#11
That's upsetting. Being able to do templating without using JavaScript was a really cool party trick.

I've used it in an unfinished website where all data was stored in a single XML file and all markup was stored in a single XSLT file. A CGI one-liner then made path info available to XSLT, and routing (multiple pages) was achieved by doing string tests inside of the XSLT template.

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#12

Destroying the open web instead of advocating to fix one of the better underutilized browser technologies for a more Profitable Google. I will not forget the name Mason Freed, destroyer of open collaborative technology.

Blame Apple and Mozilla, too, then. They all agreed to remove it.

They all agreed because XSLT is extremely unpopular and worse than JS in every way. Performance/bloat? Worse. Security? MUCH worse. Language design? Unimaginably worse.

EDIT: I wrote thousands of lines of XSLT circa 2005. I'm grateful that I'll never do that again.

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#13
To those who saw a chrome.com link and got triggered:

> The Firefox[^0] and WebKit[^1] projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT from their browser engines.

[^0]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1287#i...

[^1]: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-314...

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#15

Good, XSLT was crap. I wrote an RSS feed XSLT template. Worst dev experience ever. No one is/was using XSLT. Removing unused code is a win for browsers. Every anti bloat HNer should be cheering

The first few times you use it, XSLT is insane. But once something clicks, you figure out the kinds of things it’s good for.

I am not really a functional programming guy. But XSLT is a really cool application of functional programming for data munging, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t used it enough for it to click.

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#16

Destroying the open web instead of advocating to fix one of the better underutilized browser technologies for a more Profitable Google. I will not forget the name Mason Freed, destroyer of open collaborative technology.

Blame Apple and Mozilla, too, then. They all agreed to remove it. They all agreed because XSLT is extremely unpopular and worse than JS in every way. Performance/bloat? Worse. Security? MUCH worse. Language design? Unimaginably worse. EDIT: I wrote thousands of lines of XSLT circa 2005. I'm grateful that I'll never do that again.

This is only repeated by people who have never used it.

XSLT is still a great way of easily transforming xml-like documents. It's orders of magnitude more concise than transforming using Javascript or other general programming languages. And people are actively re-inventing XSLT for JSON (see `jq`).

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#17

TIL: Chrome supports XSLT. Good riddance I guess - it and most of the tech from the "XML era" was needlessly overcomplicated.

XSLT is really powerful and it is declarative, like CSS, but can both push and pull.

It's a loss, if you ask me, to remove it from client-side, but it's one I worked through years ago.

It's still really useful on the server side for document transformation.

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#18
Nice find — interesting to see browsers moving to drop XSLT support. I used XSLT once for a tiny site and it felt like magic—templating without JavaScript was freeing. But maybe it’s just niche now, and browser vendors see more cost than payoff.

Curious: have any of you used XSLT in production lately?

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#19

Destroying the open web instead of advocating to fix one of the better underutilized browser technologies for a more Profitable Google. I will not forget the name Mason Freed, destroyer of open collaborative technology.

Blame Apple and Mozilla, too, then. They all agreed to remove it. They all agreed because XSLT is extremely unpopular and worse than JS in every way. Performance/bloat? Worse. Security? MUCH worse. Language design? Unimaginably worse. EDIT: I wrote thousands of lines of XSLT circa 2005. I'm grateful that I'll never do that again.

How is it worse than JS? It's a different thing...

Re: Removing XSLT for a more secure browser

#20
post #7

Destroying the open web instead of advocating to fix one of the better underutilized browser technologies for a more Profitable Google. I will not forget the name Mason Freed, destroyer of open collaborative technology.

Didn't this effort start with Mozilla and not Google? I think you will in fact forget the name Mason Freed, just like most of us forgot about XSLT.

> Didn't this effort start with Mozilla and not Google?

Maybe round one of it like ten years ago did? From what I understand, it's a Google employee who opened the "Hey, I want to get rid of this and have no plans to provide a zero-effort-for-users replacement." Github Issue a few months back.

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