Comment by notatoad
3 months ago
>essentially all the feedback said "no, please don't". And they said "thanks for the feedback, we're gonna do it any way!"?
this is a perfectly reasonable course of action if the feedback is "please don't" but the people saying "please don't" aren't people who are actually using it or who can explain why it's necessary. it's a request for feedback, not just a poll.
> people who are actually using it
I'd presume that most of those people are using it in some capacity, it's just that their numbers are seen as too minor to influence the decision.
> explain why it's necessary
No feature is strictly necessary, so that's a pretty high standard.
> I'd presume that most of those people are using it in some capacity, it's just that their numbers are seen as too minor to influence the decision.
I think the idea of that is reasonable. If I used XSLT on my tiny, low-traffic blog, I think it's reasonable for browser devs to tell me to update my code. Even if 100 people like me said the same thing, that's still a vanishingly small portion of the web, a rounding error, protesting it.
I'd expect the protests to be disproportionate in number and loudness because the billion webmasters who couldn't care less aren't weighing in on it.
Now, I'm not saying this with a strong opinion on this specific proposal. It doesn't affect me either way. It's more about the general principle that a loud number of small webmasters opposing the move doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Like, people loudly argued about removing <marquee> back in the day, but that happened to be a great idea.
True, a small number of vocal opponents does not automatically make something a bad idea. But in these cases of compatibility, especially with something as big as the Web, the vast majority of those affected who do care will be completely silent. There's no hotline to call up the entire world and tell them to update their code.
(And if you did want to tell the entire world to update their code, and have any chance of them following through with it, you'd better make sure there's an immediate replacement ready. Log4Shell would probably still be a huge issue today if it couldn't be fixed in place by swapping out jar files.)
> If I used XSLT on my tiny, low-traffic blog, I think it's reasonable for browser devs to tell me to update my code.
I _do_ use XSLT on my tiny, low-traffic blog, and I _don't_ think that it's reasonable for browser devs to tell me to update my code.
Also, it's real easy to manufacture a situation where adoption of a thing is low when the implementation is incomplete and hasn't had significant updates for decades.
3 replies →
You're literally commenting on a thread full of those explanations that were handwaved away.
Google's own document says numbers don't show the full picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958929
Well, no; the reasonable course of action is to solicit feedback from the right people instead.
yeah! they should only ask for feedback from people who love XSLT, other people's opinion doesn't matter.
Part of the reason I stopped was lack of higher than 1.0 in browsers.
The other reason is that SVG took a very long time to get good, and when it did I wanted to use XSL and SVG together.
Now SVG has got good and they are removing it :(