Comment by eyelidlessness
5 months ago
I can’t say this with certainty, but I have some reason to suspect I might be partially to blame for this fun fact!
A couple years ago, I stumbled on a discussion considering deprecation/removal of XSLT support in Chrome. At some point in the discussion, they mentioned observing a notable uptick in usage—enough of an uptick (from a baseline of approximately zero) that they backed out.
The timing was closely correlated with work I’d done to adapt a library, which originally used XSLT via native Node extensions, to browser XSLT APIs. The project isn’t especially “popular” in the colloquial sense of the term, but it does have a substantial niche user base. I’m not sure how much uptake the browser adaptation of this library has had since, but some quick napkin math suggested it was at least plausible that the uptick in usage they saw might have been the onslaught of automated testing I used to validate the change while I was working on it.
And this kids is one more reason for us to use testing while developing