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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"

#471

Post by troupo »

bawolff wrote: post #453
troupo wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was mentioned in the discussions and are an easy search away. Which means that googlers in their arrogance didn't do any research at all and that their counter underrepresents data as explicitly stated in their own document https://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-conversions.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd_xml... And then there's Congress: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/

The library of congress examples appear to be using server side xslt not client side. Thus they are not affected by this deprecation. Before calling people arrogant you should read your own links. [The congress example is legit]

> [The congress example is legit]

So let me get this straight. The Congress example is legit. Multiple other cases discussed here: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 are legit

And yet it's not the Googlers and other browser implementers who didn't do even a modicum or research who are arrogant, but me, because I made a potential mistake quickly searching for something on my phone at night?

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

#472

Post by xg15 »

em-bee wrote: post #391
jerf wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript was instantly a hit from the day it was released, and it grew from there. XSLT never took off. Ever. It has never been a major force on the web, not even for five minutes. Even during the "XML all the things!" phase of the software engineering world, with every tailwind it would ever had, it was never a serious player. There was, at no point, any reason to invest in it any farther. Moreover, even if you pu…

i also don't see XSLT solving any problem that javascript could not solve. heck, if you rally need XSLT in the browser, using javascript you could even call some library like saxonjs, or you could run it webassembly.

True, but that raises the question, why don't the browsers do that? I think no one would object if they removed XSLT from the browser's core and instead loaded up some WASM/JavaScript implementation when some XSLT is actually encountered. Sort of like a "built-in extension".

Then browser devs could treat it like an extension (plus some small shims in the core) while the public API wouldn't have to change.

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

#473

Post by lenkite »

em-bee wrote: post #391
jerf wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript was instantly a hit from the day it was released, and it grew from there. XSLT never took off. Ever. It has never been a major force on the web, not even for five minutes. Even during the "XML all the things!" phase of the software engineering world, with every tailwind it would ever had, it was never a serious player. There was, at no point, any reason to invest in it any farther. Moreover, even if you pu…

i also don't see XSLT solving any problem that javascript could not solve. heck, if you rally need XSLT in the browser, using javascript you could even call some library like saxonjs, or you could run it webassembly.

You can have template includes that are auto interpreter by the browser - no need to write code AFAIK using XSLT.

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

#474

Post by lenkite »

otterley wrote: post #145
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, according to Chrome's telemetry, very, very few websites are using it in practice. It's not like the proposal is threatening to make some significant portion of the web inaccessible. At least we can see the data underlying the proposal here.

A LOT of internal corpo websites use XSLT.

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

#475

Post by lenkite »

bawolff wrote: post #453
troupo wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was mentioned in the discussions and are an easy search away. Which means that googlers in their arrogance didn't do any research at all and that their counter underrepresents data as explicitly stated in their own document https://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-conversions.html https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd_xml... And then there's Congress: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/

The library of congress examples appear to be using server side xslt not client side. Thus they are not affected by this deprecation. Before calling people arrogant you should read your own links. [The congress example is legit]

Here is an example of a URI using client-side XSLT in the library of congress. They are definitely using this feature.

https://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/profiles/00000016.xml
Before calling people arrogant you should validate your own arrogance.

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

#476

Post by MrJohz »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #316
MrJohz wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this requires someone sitting down and writing the JS polyfill, and then maintaining it indefinitely. And for something as complicated as XSLT, that will surely be indefinite maintenance, because complicated specs beget complicated implementations. In the absence of anyone raring to do that, removal seems the more sensible option.

> Sure, but this requires [...] maintaining it indefinitely. Does it, though? Browsers already have existing XSLT stacks, which have somehow gotten by practically unmodified for the last 20 years. The basic XSLT 1.0 functionality never changes, and the links between the XSLT code and the rest of the codebase rarely change, so I find it hard to believe that slapping it into a sandbox would suddenly turn it into a pers…

Wasn't this whole discussion sparked by a fairly significant bug in the libxslt implementation? There's also a comment from a Chrome developer somewhere in this thread talking about regularly trying to fix things in libxslt, and how difficult that was because of how the library is structured.

So it is currently a persistent time sync, and rewriting it so that it can sit inside the browser sandbox will probably add a significant amount of work in its own right. If that's work that nobody wants to do, then it's difficult to see what your solution actually is.

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

#477

Post by youngtaff »

em-bee wrote: post #410
youngtaff wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you format a raw XML file in the browser without XSLT?

instead of including a reference to the XSLT sylesheet apparently you can also include javascript: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16426395

But can it transform / format the XML?

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

#478

Post by philipallstar »

troupo wrote: post #468
bawolff wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first glance the library of congress link appears to be using server side XSLT, which would not be affected by this proposal. The congress one appears to be the first legit example i have seen. At first glance the congress use case does seem like it would be fully covered by CSS [you can attach CSS stylesheets to generic xml documents in a similar fashion to xslt]. Of course someone would have to make that change.

> Of course someone would have to make that change. Of course. And yet none of the people from Google even seem to be aware of > The congress one appears to be the first legit example i have seen. There are more. E.g. podcast RSS feeds are often presented on the web with XSLT: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/231452.rss Again, none of the people from Google even seem to be aware of these use cases, and just power through…

You're naming Google specifically, when it's not just Google. This seems like a you thing, separate to the actual issue at hand.

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

#479

Post by stuaxo »

account42 wrote: post #461
bawolff wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people are upset about xslt being removed, step 1 would have been to actually use it in a significant way on the web. Step 2 would have been to volunteer to maintain libxslt. Everyone likes to complain as a user of open source. Nobody likes to do the difficult work.

What use would count as significant? Only if big corp like Google uses it? XSLT is used on the web. That's why people are upset about Google & friends removing it while ignoring user feedback.

Yep, there's a massive bias in companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft to only see companies their own size.

Outside of this is a whole universe.

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

#480

Post by account42 »

raincole wrote: post #80
meindnoch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web has been prospering?

"One of the most adopted technologies, the one that is permeating into even native desktop and mobile apps, is not prospering." - HN users, probably.

"The web" implies an interconnected ecosystem of websites. That the same tech has found adoption with walled gardens is irrelevant.
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