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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

#101

Post by lunar_mycroft »

coldpie wrote: post #49
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I want to start out by noting that despite both the linked article the very comment you're replying to pointing out that the security excuse is transparently bad faith, you still trotted it out, again.

And no, it really isn't a cost benefit question. Or if you'd prefer, the _indirect_ costs of breaking backwards compatibility are much higher than the _direct_ cost. As it stood, as a web developer you only needed to make sure that your code followed standards and it would continue to work. If the browser makers can decide to depriciate those standards, developers have to instead attempt to divine whether or not the features they want to use will remain popular (or rather, whether browser makers will continue to _think_ they're popular, which is very much not the same thing).

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#102

Post by ErroneousBosh »

James_K wrote: post #95
matthews3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you run XSLT as part of your build process, and serve the generated HTML?

No because then it would not be an Atom feed. Atom is a syndication format, the successor to RSS. I must provide users with a link to a valid Atom XML document, and I want them to see a web page when this link is clicked. This is why so many people find this objectionable. If you want to have a basic blog, you need some HTML docments and and RSS/Atom feed. The technologies required to do this are HTML for the documen…

> Google is now removing one of those technologies, which makes it essentially impossible to serve a truly static website.

How so? You're just generating static pages. Generate ones that work.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#103

Post by echelon »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #56
granzymes wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standards body is deprecating XSLT with support from Mozilla and Safari (Mozilla first proposed the removal). Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”.

Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer. Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.

Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people.

I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google.

Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat.

If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#104

Post by skobes »

dfabulich wrote: post #31

In part 1 of this article, the author wrote, "XSLT is an essential companion to RSS, as it allows the feed itself to be perused in the browser" Actually, you can make an RSS feed user-browsable by using JavaScript instead. You can even run XSLT in JavaScript, which is what Google's polyfill does. I've written thousands of lines of XSLT. JavaScript is better than XSLT in every way, which is why JavaScript has thrived…

Your link is just the abstract, I had to hunt for the full talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1kc7fcF5Ao

But it is quite interesting and especially learning about the security problems of the document() function (described @ 19:40-25:38) made me feel more convinced that removing XSLT is a good decision.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#105

Post by _heimdall »

granzymes wrote: post #34
xmcp123 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting to see the casual slide of Google towards almost internet explorer 5.1 style behavior, where standards can just be ignored “because market share”. Having flashbacks of “ ”

The standards body is deprecating XSLT with support from Mozilla and Safari (Mozilla first proposed the removal). Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”.

There's a lot of history behind WhatWG that revolves around XML.

WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec.

I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#108

Post by ndriscoll »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #97
ndriscoll wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was such a non-programmer as a child, yes. At the time that XSLT was new, if you read a book on HTML and making web pages from the library, it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes. Things that blew my mind were that you could install Apache on your own computer and your desktop could be a website , or (as I learned many years later) that you could make a server application…

> it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes. That's what CSS does.

Yes that's why XSLT is such a natural fit when you learn about HTML+CSS. It's the same idea, but applied to HTML templates, which is something you immediately want when you hand-write HTML (e.g. navbars, headers, and footers that you can include on every page).

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#109

Post by Aurornis »

svieira wrote: post #44
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…

> 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 is an attempt to rewrite history.

Early browser like NCSA Mosaic were never even released as Open Source Software.

Netscape Navigator made headlines by offering a free version for academic or non-profit use, but they wanted to charge as much as $99 (in 1995 dollars!) for the browser.

Microsoft got in trouble for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

The current world where we have true open source browser options like Chromium is probably closer to a true open web than what some people have retconned the early days of the web as being.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#110

Post by carlosjobim »

charcircuit wrote: post #64

>Mozilla bent over to Google's pressure to kill off RSS by removing the “Live Bookmarks” features from the browser They both were just responding to similar market demands because end users didn't want to use RSS. Users want to use social media instead. >This is a trillion-dollar ad company who has been actively destroying the open web for over a decade Google has both done more for and invested more into progressing…

> They both were just responding to similar market demands because end users didn't want to use RSS. Users want to use social media instead.

How does that become a market demand to remove RSS? There are tons of features within browsers which most users don't use. But they do no harm staying there.

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