Comment by troupo
3 months ago
> I also don't really understand the complaint from the Chrome people that are proposing it: "it's too complex, high-profile bugs, here's a polyfill you can use".
Especially considering the amount of complex standards they have qualms about from WebUSB to 20+ web components standards
> On the other hand, I don't normally view RSS feeds manually.
Chrome metrics famously underrepresent corporate installation. There could be quite a few corporate applications using XSLT as it was all the rage 15-20 years ago.
My guess is that they're fine with WebBluetooth/USB/FileSystem/etc. because the code for the new standard is recent and sticks with modern security sensibilities.
XSLT (and basically anything else that existed when HTML5 turned ten years old) is old code using old quality standards and old APIs that still need to be maintained. Browsers can rewrite them to be all new and modern, but it's a job very few people are interested in (and Google's internal structure heavily prioritizes developing new things over maintaining old stuff).
Nobody is making a promotion by modernizing the XSLT parser. Very few people even use XSLT in their day to day, and the biggest product of the spec is a competitor to at least three of the four major browser manufacturers.
XSLT is an example of exciting tech that failed. WebSerial is exciting tech that can still prove itself somehow.
The corporate installations still doing XSLT will get stuck running an LTS browser like they did with IE11 and the many now failed strains of technology that still supports (anyone remember ActiveX?).
We pentest lots of corporate applications so if this was widespreadly deployed in the last ~8 years that I've been doing the job full time, I don't know how I would have missed it (like, never even saw a talk about it, never saw a friend using it, never heard a colleague having to deal with it... there's lots of opportunities besides getting such an assignment myself). Surely there are talks on it if you look for it, just that I haven't the impression that this is a common corporate thing, at least among the kinds of customers we have (mainly larger organizations). A sibling comment mentions they use it on their hobby site though