Comment by JimDabell
3 months ago
> I think this could be addressed by introducing a <?human-readable ...some url...?> processing instruction that browsers would interpret like a meta tag redirect. Then sites that are interested could put that line at the top of their XML files and redirect to an alternative representation in HTML or even to a server-side or WASM-powered XSLT processor for the file.
HTTP has already had this since the 90s. Clients send the Accept HTTP header indicating which format they want and servers can respond with alternative representations. You can already respond with HTML for browsers and XML for other clients today. You don’t need the browser to know how to do the transformation.
This is breaking the web though.
If they are so worried, then have the xslt support compiled to wasm and sandboxed.
This is not breaking the web, stop being so needlessly hyperbolic. XSLT use is absolutely tiny. If you removed it, >99.9% of the web wouldn’t even notice.
If we removed everyone named Jim Dabell from the world, the other 99% wouldn't even notice. They're absolutely tiny. Perhaps we should try doing that.
2 replies →
Apart from that doesn’t really work for people who are statically hosting their RSS feeds etc.
You can use content negotiation with static websites too. Apache has mod_negotiation, for example.
Assuming you have access to server configuration. XML/XSLT works anywhere you can host a static page.
1 reply →
Most people are hosting static sites on GH pages, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare pages etc