Comment by LegionMammal978
3 months ago
> 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.
The web has grown a thousand fold over those decades, in spite of no support for XSLT. No browser has failed (or gained market traction) by missing support for (or adding more support for) XSLT. It's an irrelevancy, even if you did like it once.
Lots of content was lost when Flash was removed as well - much, much more than the amount of content that will be lost if XSLT is removed. And yet the web continued.
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