Comment by xvilka

3 months ago

There is a better alternative to libxslt - xee[1][2]. It was discussed[3] on HN before.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43502291

Disclaimer: I work on Chrome/Blink and I've also contributed a (very small) number of patches to libxml/libxslt.

It's not just a matter of replacing the libxslt; libxslt integrates quite closely with libxml2. There's a fair amount of glue to bolt libxml2/libxslt on to Blink (and WebKit); I can't speak for Gecko.

Even when there's no work on new XML/XSLT features, there's a passive cost to just having that glue code around since it adds quirks and special cases that otherwise wouldn't exist.

> Xee implements modern versions of these specifications, rather than the versions released in 1999.

My understanding is that browsers specifically use the 1999 version and changing this would break compat