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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"

#531

Post by phatskat »

rendaw wrote: post #434
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.

I'm not that familiar with XSLT but isn't it already quite hobbled? Can it be used in a significant way? Or is this a chicken-egg problem where proving it's useful requires the implementation to be filled out first.

On the link in the post you can scroll down to someone’s comment with a few links to XSLT in action.

It’s been years since I’ve touched it, but clicking the congressional bill XML link and seeing a perfectly formatted and readable page reminded me of exactly why XSLT has a place. To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied - this could of course be backend or frontend, either way it’s a lot of engineering overhead for a task that, with XSLT, requires just a stylesheet.

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

#532

Post by phatskat »

otterley wrote: post #397
ndriscoll wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically, how many websites are using webusb? I'm guessing fewer than xslt, which is used by e.g. the US Congress website. I have a hard time buying the idea that document templating is some niche use-case compared to pretty much every modern javascript api. More realistically, lots of younger people don't know it's there. People constantly bemoan html's "lack" of client side includes or extensible component sys…

Where is the US Congress's website identified as a potentially impacted site? https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... edit: I see Simon mentioned it - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/ - e.g., https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr3617/BILLS-119hr3617ih.... - the site seems to be even less popular than Longhorn Steakhouse in Germany. My guess is that they'll shuffle people to PDF or m…

Is it cheaper than sending XML and a stylesheet though?

Further, PDF and server-side are fine for achieving the same display, but it removes the XML of it all - that is to say, someone might be using the raw XML to lower tools, feeds, etc. if XSLT goes away and congress drops the XML links in favor of PDFs etc, that breaks more than just the pretty formatting

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

#533

Post by account42 »

izacus wrote: post #506
account42 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any solution that requires any change to the websites affected, no matter how small, is not a solution at all. DO. NOT. BREAK. THE. WEB.

Ah how easy is it to bloviate when you're not actually the one having to maintain the web, huh?

Google doesn't have to maintain the web, they chose to. They also chose to make the web infinitely more complicated so that others are less likely to "compete" for that responsibility. You don't get to insert yourself into that position and then only reap the benefits without putting int the required effort.

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

#534

Post by account42 »

pas wrote: post #498
account42 wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Website operators are fine with how libxslt works now. It's browser vendors that want change.

You mean they are fine with expecting it to be maintained by browser vendors indefinitely for free.

Browser vendors aren't maintaining the web for fee, they are for profit corporations that have chosen to take on that role for the benefits it provides to them. It's only fair that we demand that they also respect the responsibilities that come with it. And we can also point out the hollowness about complaints of hardship due to having to maintain the web's legacy when they keep making it harder for independent browser developers by adding tons on new complexity.

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

#535

Post by colejohnson66 »

dpassens wrote: post #491
dev0001 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, because that would add a dependency on Javascript whereas, at the moment, XSLT works without Javascript enabled.

Not necessarily. The idea is that this is browser-internal, so presumably it would still work even if JS from external sources is disabled.

No. The idea is that website authors do the work. The proposal suggests the browsers wholesale remove support and forget about it.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...

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

#536

Post by pas »

account42 wrote: post #534
pas wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean they are fine with expecting it to be maintained by browser vendors indefinitely for free.

Browser vendors aren't maintaining the web for fee, they are for profit corporations that have chosen to take on that role for the benefits it provides to them. It's only fair that we demand that they also respect the responsibilities that come with it. And we can also point out the hollowness about complaints of hardship due to having to maintain the web's legacy when they keep making it harder for independent brows…

Sure, of course, but unless funding is coming from users the economics won't change, because:

The vendors cite an aspect of said responsibility (security!) to get rid of an other aspect (costly maintenance of a low-revenue feature).

The web is evolving, there's a ton of things that developers (and website product people, and end-users) want. Of course it comes with a lot of "frivolous" innovation, but that's part of finding the right abstractions/APIs.

(And just to make it clear, I think it's terrible for the web and vendors that ~100% of the funding comes from a shady oligopoly that makes money by selling users - but IMHO this doesn't invalidate the aforementioned resource allocation trade off.)

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

#537

Post by dpassens »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #535
dpassens wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The idea is that this is browser-internal, so presumably it would still work even if JS from external sources is disabled.

No. The idea is that website authors do the work. The proposal suggests the browsers wholesale remove support and forget about it. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...

Oh, I understand that that's the WHATWG proposal. I'm talking about webstrand's idea.

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

#538

Post by otterley »

phatskat wrote: post #532
otterley wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the US Congress's website identified as a potentially impacted site? https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... edit: I see Simon mentioned it - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/ - e.g., https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hr3617/BILLS-119hr3617ih.... - the site seems to be even less popular than Longhorn Steakhouse in Germany. My guess is that they'll shuffle people to PDF or m…

Is it cheaper than sending XML and a stylesheet though? Further, PDF and server-side are fine for achieving the same display, but it removes the XML of it all - that is to say, someone might be using the raw XML to lower tools, feeds, etc. if XSLT goes away and congress drops the XML links in favor of PDFs etc, that breaks more than just the pretty formatting

1. No, not cheaper, but the incremental cost of server-side rendering is minimal (especially at the low request rates these pages receive)

2. One should still be able to retrieve the raw XML document. It's just that it won't be automatically transformed client-side.

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

#539

Post by WhitneyLand »

troupo wrote: post #386
WhitneyLand wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“That is exactly how web standards work…” Says who? You keep mentioning this 0.1% threshold yet… 1. I can’t find any reference to that do you have examples / citations? 2. On the contrary here’s a paper that proposes a 3x higher heuristic: https://arianamirian.com/docs/icse2019_deprecation.pdf 3. It seems there are plenty of examples of features being removed above that threshold NPAPI/SPDY/WebSQL/etc. 4. Resources a…

E.g. Google said in their document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS... --- start quote --- As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-base…

Thank you for the citation. Up voted.

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

#540

Post by bawolff »

phatskat wrote: post #531
rendaw wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not that familiar with XSLT but isn't it already quite hobbled? Can it be used in a significant way? Or is this a chicken-egg problem where proving it's useful requires the implementation to be filled out first.

On the link in the post you can scroll down to someone’s comment with a few links to XSLT in action. It’s been years since I’ve touched it, but clicking the congressional bill XML link and seeing a perfectly formatted and readable page reminded me of exactly why XSLT has a place. To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get a…

> To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied

No, you can use directives with CSS to attach a css stylesheet directly to an xml file.

CSS is not as flexible as xslt, but this seems to be very simple formatting which is well within what css is capable of.

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