Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is killing the open web, part 2

wok.oblomov.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 362 posts

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#321

Post by kuschku »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #317
kuschku wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference between HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 is exactly like the difference between plugging your PC in with a green cable or a red cable. The client neither knows nor cares. Just like protocol negotiation, HTTP has format negotiation and XML postprocessing for exactly the same reason. > So what do I put as the URL of an MP3 and an Ogg of the same song? It's the same content, just supplied in a different format Whate…

> Whatever you want? If I access example.org/example.png, most websites will return a webp or avif instead if my browser supports it. So, you need a lot of cleverness on the browser to detect which format the client needs, and return the correct thing? Kind of not the same situation as emitting an XML file and a chunk of XSLT with it, really. If you're going to make the server clever, why not just make the server cle…

> If you're going to make the server clever, why not just make the server clever enough to return either an RSS feed or an HTML page depending on what it guesses the client wants?

There's no cleverness involved, this is an inherent part of the HTTP protocol. But Chrome still advertises full support for XHTML and XML:

    Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
But importantly, for audio/video files, that's still just serving static files, which is very different from having to dynamically generate different files.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#322

Post by rldjbpin »

the op keeps highlighting how these actions affect rss feeds, including references to previous instances such as:

> when Mozilla bent over to Google's pressure to kill off RSS by removing the “Live Bookmarks” features from the browser

if hypothetically the browsers stop supporting the format, nothing stops dedicated rss/atom/json feed readers to work as normal. might be my myopic point of view but most users to still use the standard has predominantly used this approach since google reader days.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#323

Post by ErroneousBosh »

kuschku wrote: post #291
shadowgovt wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the server should supply the right format based on the `Accept` header, be it `application/rss+xml` or `application/atom+xml` or `text/xml` or `text/html`. Even cheaper than shipping the client an XML and an XSLT is just shipping them the HTML the XSLT would output in the first place.

That's not exactly cheap on an arduino uno 3 with 2kb ram. But regardless, someone suggested just including a script tag with xmlns of xhtml as alternative, which should work well enough (though not ideal).

How many people out of the world's nearly eight billion population, would you estimate, are attempting to host their blog including HTML posts and RSS feeds on an Arduino?

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#324

Post by kuschku »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #323
kuschku wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not exactly cheap on an arduino uno 3 with 2kb ram. But regardless, someone suggested just including a script tag with xmlns of xhtml as alternative, which should work well enough (though not ideal).

How many people out of the world's nearly eight billion population, would you estimate, are attempting to host their blog including HTML posts and RSS feeds on an Arduino?

A lot of IoT devices use this strategy, actually. A lot. Significantly more than are using e.g. WebUSB.

Nonetheless, by that same argument you could just kill HN off. A lot of projects have a benefit that far outweighs their raw usage numbers.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#325

Post by basscomm »

dfabulich wrote: post #310
basscomm wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would adding a fragile and little-used technology like XSLT help? A few years ago I bought a bunch of Skylanders for practically nothing when the toys to life fad faded away. To keep track of everything I made a quick and dirty XSLT script that sorted and organized the list of figures and formatted each one based on their 'element'. That would have been murderous to do in plain HTML and CSS: https://wyrm.org/in…

It would have been murderous with just CSS, but it would have been trivial to do with JS, much easier than the hundreds of lines of XSL you wrote. https://wyrm.org/inventory/skylanders.xsl

> but it would have been trivial to do with JS

Maybe! How much Javascript would I have to learn before I could come up with a 'trivial' solution?

> the hundreds of lines of XSL you wrote.

Those hundreds of lines are the same copy/pasted if statement with 5 different conditions. For each game, I create a table by: alphabetizing the XML > going through the list searching for figures that match the game > each time I find one go through the color list to find the color to use for the table row. There are 10 color choices per game, which means that I repeated a 10-choice if statement 5 times.

There's nothing difficult here, it's just verbose.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#326

Post by lenkite »

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”.

> The standards body is deprecating XSLT

The "CORPO CARTEL body" is deprecating XSLT. WhatWG is a not really a standards body like the W3C.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#327

Post by andsoitis »

basscomm wrote: post #234
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…

I've been running a small hobby site using XML and XSLT for the last five or so years, but Google refused to index it because Googlebot doesn't execute XSLT. I can't be the only one, but good luck Googling it

> but good luck Googling it

Link?

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#328

Post by andsoitis »

basscomm wrote: post #238
Analemma_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another bit of ridiculousness is pinning the removal on Google. Removing XSLT was proposed by Mozilla and unanimously supported with no objections by the rest of the WHATWG. Go blame Mozilla if you want somebody to get mad at, or least blame all the browser vendors equally. This has nothing to do with Chrome’s market share.

Shouldn't the users of the Web also get a say? There's been a lot of blowback on this decision, so this isn't as cut and dried as it's being made out to be

> Shouldn't the users of the Web also get a say?

How?

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#329

Post by basscomm »

andsoitis wrote: post #327
basscomm wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running a small hobby site using XML and XSLT for the last five or so years, but Google refused to index it because Googlebot doesn't execute XSLT. I can't be the only one, but good luck Googling it

> but good luck Googling it Link?

https://wyrm.org/index.xml

I migrated to an Org-mode-based workflow a couple of weeks ago because I can see the writing on the wall, but most of the XML and XSLT files are still in place because cool URIs don't change(1).

Who knows how many other XML and XSLT-based sites still exist on the internet because Google refuses to index that content

1. https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#330

Post by basscomm »

andsoitis wrote: post #328
basscomm wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't the users of the Web also get a say? There's been a lot of blowback on this decision, so this isn't as cut and dried as it's being made out to be

> Shouldn't the users of the Web also get a say? How?

Using the technology and opting in to telemetry, feedback forums, user surveys, newsgroups, letter writing, email campaigns, telnet into a BBS, grass-roots websites, semaphore, Morse code, teletype, fax, etc.

Anything is better than nothing, if anyone actually listens to the feedback they get instead of taking it and ignoring it.

Post reply on HN