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Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

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Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#81

Post by bawolff »

toyg wrote: post #27
bawolff wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wikipedia api has an option where you can add an xslt stylesheet to its output. When i was young and stupid and learning to program i made an xslt stylesheet to extract dictionary definitions from the api. It was meant to be combined with a bookmarklet that when you double clicked a word opened it in an iframe. It was terrible, but i was so proud of it at the time. It seems like it stopped working at some point,…

> It was terrible, but i was so proud of it at the time. Terrible why? Bookmarklets and XSLT (and things like Greasemonkey userscripts) were some of the things that made the web more "read-write" in the '00s: anyone could remix web content however they saw fit, optimizing it for their personal use-cases, and often attracted kids and "normies" to coding. Even today, they can be used to do stuff that most people find m…

Sadly i just filed a bug to remove the xslt option from mediawiki's api.

By terrible i just mean the code was really hacky. I was a newbie and exploring.

Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#82

Post by bawolff »

account42 wrote: post #40
miki_oomiri wrote: post #5

The quality of the github comments: accusing developers of being dictators, being overly emotionally, the hate towards people who actually made the web happen (Smaug, Anne, Emilo, etc…), the "why not just…" or "hire more people" remarks... For a browser developer, this is depressing. I've worked on Gecko for 10+ years, and we were constantly called names for absolutely any change we would do. Insulted and accused of…

Or you could try having more empathy and being less done deaf yourself. Users don't like when you take functionality away from them. This is an appropriate response to a proposal to break part of the web just to make things a bit easier for browser developers (who are meanwhile adding a gazillion other things that are much more complex and actively hurt the users interests).

As someone who is an open source dev (but not for anything this prominent).

Sometimes you have to remove features to make a product good. Its sad, but if your product includes the kitchen sink, its not a good product and drags everything down.

The users yell at me too sometimes.

Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#84

Post by chrismorgan »

Avamander wrote: post #72
chrismorgan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t call FTP part of the web platform—it was never integrated . All you could do was link to it, and then the browser might be able to render it itself (Firefox and Chromium, until a few years ago), or open another app that could (IE and Safari, and Firefox and Chromium probably can still). JavaScript has added things, not removed them. There are other HTML elements and attributes that were never in any spec a…

> But they were never supported by more than two of the three or four main engines, or if they were their functionality has been retained. Isn't this the same as a feature being removed from the web platform? If not, then what are the exact engines I need to consider to think of a a feature that has been removed?

This is all stuff from the turbulent times where Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were frequently doing different and incompatible things. I don’t think any of the things that actually got removed were even supported by both of them.

Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#85

Post by LtWorf »

haburka wrote: post #35
edent wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, it’s important to be kind to other humans and to treat humans with respect. Very true. But why is that argument never deployed against the bullies? Chrome's developers say "We want to do X". People say "No, please don't." Chrome says "I'm not going to respect your wishes." Where's the equality in that? > Now it can be difficult to voice opposition without coming off as rude but its definitely an important…

> Very true. But why is that argument never deployed against the bullies? Unfortunately part of being an adult is realizing there are no bullies. There are adults with power and some people who wield unfairly, but that’s different from a mean schoolchild, although the similarities are there. I don’t think the people who work on browser standards are bullies and it’s weird to frame them in that way. > Where's the equa…

> There are adults with power and some people who wield unfairly

Bullies, the mafia… it's a question of scale really.

Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#86

Post by dev0001 »

U.S. legislation is delivered on the web as XSLT-styled XML and depends on web browsers continuing to provide native support for client-side XSLT. Examples:

https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BIL...

Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#87

Post by dev0001 »

07cwu9 wrote: post #77
chrismorgan wrote: post #64

I am reminded of when Google attempted to kill MathML a few years ago because it was complexity and no one was using it (… because Chromium didn’t support it—all others did). There was widespread rebellion, and it actually led to Igalia implementing it and Google accepting and shipping it. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a resurgence of interest in XSLT after this, if only for formatting Atom/RSS feeds. (BTW, prefer A…

I'd like to genuinely ask: what's the benefit of providing a visually appealing feed? I thought feeds were meant for programs . Do you/people directly browse individual feeds? Nice feed look BTW!

Most of the time you wouldn't even notice that a web page is the result of a client-side XSLT transformation, for example:

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0182.xml

Re: Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?

#90

Post by account42 »

bawolff wrote: post #82
account42 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could try having more empathy and being less done deaf yourself. Users don't like when you take functionality away from them. This is an appropriate response to a proposal to break part of the web just to make things a bit easier for browser developers (who are meanwhile adding a gazillion other things that are much more complex and actively hurt the users interests).

As someone who is an open source dev (but not for anything this prominent). Sometimes you have to remove features to make a product good. Its sad, but if your product includes the kitchen sink, its not a good product and drags everything down. The users yell at me too sometimes.

The problem here is that the web is not Google's product but they are treating it as if were.
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