Google is killing the open web, part 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#111

Post by ErroneousBosh » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

koakuma-chan wrote: post #69

Demiurge wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worked for a company where I had to make screenshots every minute and upload them via FTP for review to get paid. If there was multiple screenshots with the same thing on the screen, there would be questions.

Did you do any work besides taking screenshots and trying to figure out why FTP was broken this time?

Your old job's broken workflow is not a good reason for keeping a fundamentally broken protocol that relies on allowing Remote Code Execution as a privileged user around.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#112

Post by joeldg » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#113

Post by jeffbee » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:51 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #86

ndriscoll wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JavaScript is better than XSLT in every way Obviously not in every way. XSLT is declarative and builds pretty naturally off of HTML for someone who doesn't know any programming languages. It gives a very low-effort but fairly high power (especially considering its neglect) on-ramp to templated web pages with no build steps or special server software (e.g. PHP, Ruby) that you need to maintain. It's an extremely natu…

> XSLT is declarative and builds pretty naturally off of HTML for someone who doesn't know any programming languages. Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively? I'd be willing to bet good money that the Venn diagram of users that fit the intersection of "authoring content for the web", "care about separating content from HTML", "comfortabl…

Funnily enough, XSLT is one of those things that I don't know very well but LLMs do. I find that I can ask Gemini to blurt out an XSLT implementation of my requirements given a snippet of example doc, and I have used this to good effect in some web scrapers/robots.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#114

Post by waitwot » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

xmcp123 wrote: post #25

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.

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 “ ”

Interesting to watch technologists complain rather than engineer alternatives, ignore political activism.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#115

Post by jeffbee » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

"Nobody wants my nerd bullshit, part 42"

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#116

Post by glenstein » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #103

andrewl-hn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you say more about the teams let go who worked on MDN and Rust? Wondering if I can read anything on it to stay up to speed.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#117

Post by ErroneousBosh » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

ndriscoll wrote: post #108

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Your problem here is that you're hand-writing HTML including all the templates. This wasn't a good way to do it 30 years ago and it's not a good way to do it now.

See all these "static site generators" everyone's into these days? We used those in the mid-90s. They were called "Makefiles".

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#118

Post by amarant » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #36

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 “ ”

I don’t get the comparison. The XSLT deprecation has support beyond Google.

It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil.

HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#119

Post by dewey » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #100

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”.

Then standards body is Google and a bunch of companies consuming Google engine code.

I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#120

Post by dietr1ch » Mon, Nov 17, 2025, 5:55 PM UTC

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.

> Currently, they seem to favor xml-rs which only implements a subset of XML.

Which seems to be a sane decision given the XML language allows for data blow-ups[^0]. I'm not sure what specific subset of XML `xml-rs` implements, but to me it seems insane to fully implement XML because of this.

[^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack