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Google is killing the open web, part 2

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Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#41

Post by troupo »

crazygringo wrote: post #12
ablob wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Steering for more simplicity" would be a political decision. Keeping it is also a political decision. Removing a feature that is used, while possibly making chrome more "simple", also forces all the users of that feature to react to it, lest their efforts are lost to incompatibility. There is no way this can not be a political decision, given that either way one side will have to cope with the downsides of whatever…

No, the idea is that "political decision" is used in opposition to a decision based on rational tradeoffs. If there isn't enough usage of a feature to justify prioritizing engineering hours to it instead of other features, so it's removed, that's just a regular business-as-usual decision. Nothing "political" about it. It's straightforward cost-benefit. However, if the decision is based on factors beyond simple cost-b…

> If there isn't enough usage of a feature to justify prioritizing engineering hours to it instead of other features, so it's removed, that's just a regular business-as-usual decision. Nothing "political" about it. It's straightforward cost-benefit.

Then why is Google actively shoving multiple hardware APIs into the browser (against the objection of other vendors) if their usage is 10x less than that of XSLT?

They have no trouble finding the resource to develop and maintain those

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#42

Post by tracker1 »

Demiurge wrote: post #27
chb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Widely used? By whom? Devs who don't understand rsync or scp? Give me a practical scenario where a box is running FTP but not SSH. Edit: then account for the fact that this rare breed of content uploader doesn't use an FTP client... there's absolutely no reason to have FTP client code in a browser. It's an attack surface that is utterly unnecessary.

Also, the protocol is pretty much a holdover from the earliest days, before encryption, or complicated NATs. I remember using it with just telnet a few times. It's pretty cool, but absolutely nobody should be using FTP these days. I remember saying this back in the 2005, and here we are 20 years later, someone still lamenting dropping FTP support from a browser? I think we're decades overdue.

I'm not lamenting it being removed.. but will say that it was probably a huge multiple more popular and widely used than XSLT is in the browser.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#43

Post by PaulHoule »

_sr6i wrote: post #23
PaulHoule wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The case for JPEG XL is much better than that for XSLT. On the other hand, people who program in C will always be a little terrified of XML and everything around it since the parsing code will be complex and vulnerable.

Having a background in C/C++, that was the problem I ran into when I had to learn XSLT at translation company that used it to style documents across multiple formats. The upside of using XML was that you could store semantically rich info into the tags for the translators and designers. The downside, of course, with all the metadata, was that the files could be really large and the XSLT was usually specifically progr…

XSLT is really strange in that it's not really what people think it is. It's really a pattern-matching and production rules system right out of the golden age of AI but people think it is just an overcomplicated Jinja2 or handlebars.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#44

Post by svieira »

nwellnhof wrote: post #20

Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue and I'm saying that as ex-maintainer of libxslt who probably triggered (not caused) this removal. What's more interesting is that Chromium plans to switch to a Rust-based XML parser. Currently, they seem to favor xml-rs which only implements a subset of XML. So apparently, Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well. This is a lot more concerning.

> Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue

> Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well.

> They're the same picture.

To spell it out, "if it's inconvenient, it goes", is something that the _owner_ does. The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". This kind of "well, it's dashed inconvenient to maintain a WASM layer for a dependency that is not safe to vendor any more as a C dependency" is not the kind of servant-oriented mentality that made the web great, not just as a platform to build on, but as a platform to emulate.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#45

Post by spankalee »

This page makes some wild claims, like Google wants to deprecate MathML, even though it basically just landed. Yeah, the Chrome team wasn't prioritizing the work and it came through Igalia, but the best time for Chrome to kill MathML would have been before it was actually usable on the web.

The post also fails to mention that all browsers want to remove XSLT. The topic was brought up in several meetings by Firefox reps. It's not a Google conspiracy.

I also see that the site is written in XHTML and think the author must just really love XML, and doesn't realize that most browser maintainers think that XHTML is a mistake and failure. Being strict on input in failing to render anything on an error is antithetical to the "user agent" philosophy that says the browser should try to render something useful to the user anyway. Forgiving HTML is just better suited for the messy web. I bet this fuels some of their anger here.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#46

Post by kstrauser »

Aurornis wrote: post #22
troupo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a dead format that no one uses[1], This has to be proven by Google (and other browser vendors), not by people coming up with examples. The guy pushing "intent to deprecate" didn't even know about the most popular current usage (displaying podcast RSS feeds) until after posting the issue and until after people started posting examples: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315... Meanwhile Go…

> Also, "no one uses it" is rich considering that XSLT's usage is 10x the usage of features Google has no trouble shoving into the browser and maintaining. Compare XSLT https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity ... with … Comparing absolute usage of an old standard to newer niche features isn’t useful. The USB feature is niche, but very useful and helpful for pages setting up a device. I wouldn’t e…

Furthermore, you can’t polyfill USB support. It’s something that the browser itself must support if it’s going to be used at all, as by definition it can’t run entirely inside the browser.

That’s not true for XSLT, except in the super-niche case of formatting RSS prettily via linking to XSLT like a stylesheet, and the intersection of “people who consume RSS” and “people who regularly consume it directly through the browser” has to be vanishingly small.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#47

Post by jillesvangurp »

nwellnhof wrote: post #20

Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue and I'm saying that as ex-maintainer of libxslt who probably triggered (not caused) this removal. What's more interesting is that Chromium plans to switch to a Rust-based XML parser. Currently, they seem to favor xml-rs which only implements a subset of XML. So apparently, Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well. This is a lot more concerning.

> This is a lot more concerning.

I'm not so sure that's problematic. Probably browser just aren't a great platform for doing a lot of XML processing at this point.

Preserving the half implemented frozen state of the early 2000s really doesn't really serve anyone except those maintaining legacy applications from that era. I can see why they are pulling out complex C++ code related to all this.

It's the natural conclusion of XHTML being sidelined in favor of HTML 5 about 15-20 years ago. The whole web service bubble, bloated namespace processing, and all the other complexity that came with that just has a lot of gnarly libraries associated with it. The world kind of has moved on since then.

From a security point of view it's probably a good idea to reduce the attack surface a bit by moving to a Rust based implementation. What use cases remain for XML parsing in a browser if XSLT support is removed? I guess some parsing from javascript. In which case you could argue that the usual solution in the JS world of using polyfills and e.g. wasm libraries might provide a valid/good enough alternative or migration path.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#48

Post by pessimizer »

What you actually want is a web that isn't decided by the whims of massive monopolies, not XSLT. XSLT is not good. Google will not be caring that you do not comply, and that you don't install their polyfill; it's some real vote with your wallet middle-class style consumer activism. It's an illusion of control. If you don't eat the bugs, you'll starve, then everyone is eating the bugs.

Try having an opposition party that isn't appointing judges like Amit Mehta. Or pardoning torturers, and people who engineered the financial crash, and people who illegally spied on everyone, etc., etc. But good luck with that, we can't even break up a frozen potato monopoly.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#49

Post by coldpie »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #38
coldpie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drama around the XSLT stuff is ridiculous. It's a dead format that no one uses[1], no one will miss, no one wants to maintain, and that provides significant complexity and attack surface. It's unambiguously the right thing to do to remove it. No one who actually works in the web space disagrees. Yes, it's a problem that Chrome has too much market share, but XSLT's removal isn't a good demonstration of that. [1] Y…

The fact that people didn't realize that a site used XSLT before the recent drama is meaningless. Even as a developer, I don't know how most of the sites I visit work under the hood. Unless I have a reason to go poking around, I would probably never know whether a site used react, solid, svelte, or jquery. But it ultimately doesn't matter either way. A major selling point/part of the "contract" the web platform has w…

> Browser makers choosing to break that "contract" is bad for the internet regardless of how popular XSLT is.

No, this is wrong.

Maintaining XSLT support has a cost, both in providing an attack surface and in employee-hours just to keep it around. Suppose it is not used at all, then removing it would be unquestionably good, as cost & attack surface would go down with no downside. Obviously it's not the case that it has zero usage, so it comes down to a cost-benefit question, which is where popularity comes in.

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