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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"

#121

Post by timmg »

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.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Technical people like us have our desires. But the billions of people doing banking on their browsers probably have different priorities.

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

#122

Post by phkahler »

mmastrac wrote: post #33

This would be sad, but I think it's sadder that we didn't spend more effort integrating more modern XSLT. It was painful to use _but_ if it had a few revisions in the browser I think it would have been a massive contender to things like React. XML was unfairly demonized for the baggage that IBM and other enterprise orgs tied to it, but the standard itself was frigging amazing and powerful.

I have to agree. I liked XSLT and would have done much more with just a few additions to it.

Converting a simple manually edited xml database of things to html was awesome. What I mostly wanted the ability to pass in a selected item to display differently. That would allow all sorts of interactivity with static documents.

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

#123

Post by codedokode »

9dev wrote: post #110
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…

While this sounds crazy at first, I could warm for several incremental layers of features, where browsers could choose to implement support for only a set of layers. The lowest layer would be something like HTTP with plain text, the next one HTML, then CSS with basic selectors, then CSS with the full selector set, then ECMA and WASM, then device APIs, and so forth. Would make it possible to create spec-compliant brow…

There is no point in several layers because to maximize compatibility developers would need to target the simplest layer. And if they don't, simple browsers won't be able to compete with full-fledged ones.

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

#124

Post by bayindirh »

arccy wrote: post #48
bayindirh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The official statement from Brian was “I received a couple of personal e-mails from some credible people who stated that their data belonged to them, so we (I) decided to make it opt-in” (paraphrased). I spent days in that thread. That uproar was “a bunch of noisy minority which doesn’t worth listening” for them.

where is this official statement, I don't think you even managed to get the name right

Sorry. Was at dinner. It's Russ Cox. Being hungry and in a hurry doesn't help with remembering names.

The GitHub discussion is there: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409

but the words I of Russ I cited is here: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/73vJrjQTU1M/m/WKj7p...

Copying verbatim:

    It's good to know that's what it looks like. I can tell you that the shouting did not really influence the decision. Long-time Go contributors and supporters commenting quietly or emailing me privately had far greater influence.
So as a person who just started programming Go and made some good technical comments didn't matter at all. Only people with clout has mattered, and the voice had to come from the team itself. Otherwise we the users' influence is "fuck all" (sorry, my blood boils every time I read this comment from Russ).

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

#126

Post by hollowonepl »

jahnu wrote: post #65
coldpie wrote: post #26

I have no opinion on this, just sharing my one-and-only XSLT story. My first job in software was as a software test development intern at a ~500 employee non-profit, in about 2008 when I was about 19 or 20 years old. Writing software to test software. One of my tasks during the 2 years I worked there was to write documentation for their XML test data format. The test data was written in XML documents, then run throug…

I implemented the full XPath and XSLT language with debugging capabilities for a company I used to work for some 25ish years ago. It was fun (until XPath and XSLT 2. Well that was fun too but because of nice work colleague not the language) but I always did wonder how this took off and Lisp didn’t.

Blame the java people, they always over engineered and those 25 years ago they still had a voice.

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

#127

Post by spankalee »

spankalee wrote: post #92

A few things to note: - This isn't Chrome doing this unilaterally. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 shows that representatives from every browser are supportive and there have been discussions about this in standards meetings: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11146#issuecomment-275... - You can see from the WHATNOT meeting agenda that it was a Mozilla engineer who brought it up last time. - Opening a…

Also, https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 (Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?) is not a request for community feedback.

It's an issue open on the HTML spec for the HTML spec maintainers to consider. It was opened by a Chrome engineer after at least two meetings where a Mozilla engineer raised the topic, and where there was apparently vendor support for it.

This is happening after some serious exploits were found: https://www.offensivecon.org/speakers/2025/ivan-fratric.html

And the maintainer of libxslt has stepped down: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913

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

#128

Post by bayindirh »

tptacek wrote: post #60
bayindirh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The official statement from Brian was “I received a couple of personal e-mails from some credible people who stated that their data belonged to them, so we (I) decided to make it opt-in” (paraphrased). I spent days in that thread. That uproar was “a bunch of noisy minority which doesn’t worth listening” for them.

It's weird to see you try to make hay out of Google doing the thing you actually wanted them to do.

Please see my other comment in the same thread.

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

#129

Post by kemayo »

magnio wrote: post #62

I don't get the people complaining that they need it on their low-power microcontrollers yet instead of using an XSLT library they'd rather pull in Chromium. With how bloated browsers are right now, good riddance IMO

I think they're talking about outputting XML+XSLT on those microcontrollers, i.e. just putting out text. Chromium would come in for the viewer who's loading whatever tiny status-webpage those microcontrollers are hosting on a separate device.

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

#130

Post by o11c »

lucb1e wrote: post #52
ndriscoll wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RSS likely isn't the only thing that uses it. XSLT is basically the client side declarative template language for XML/HTML that people always complain doesn't exist (e.g. letting you create your own tags or do includes with no server or build steps).

I understand that there are more possible uses for the tool, but RSS is the only one I saw someone mention. Are there more examples? It may be that I don't notice when I use it, if the page just translates itself into XHTML and I would never know until opening the developer tools (which I do often, fwiw: so many web forms are broken that I have a habit of opening F12, so I always still have my form entries in the net…

Almost every single government organization uses it to publish their official documents. Lots of major corporations too.

As much of a monopoly as Chrome is, if they actually try to remove it they're likely to get a bunch of government web pages outright stating "Chrome is unsupported, please upgrade to Firefox or something".

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