Comment by blablabla123

> They are removing XSLT just for being a long-tail technology. The same argument would apply to other long-tail web technologies.

That's a concise way to put it. IMHO this is also the main problem of the standard.

However I think XSLT isn't only long tail but also a curiosity with just academic value. I've being doing some experimentation and prototyping with XSLT while it was still considered alive. So even if you see some value in it, the problems are endless:

* XSLT is cumbersome to write and read

* XML is clunky, XSLT even more so

* yes there's SLAX, which is okay-ish but it becomes clear very fast that it's indeed just Syntax sugar

* there's XSLT 2.0 but there's no software support

* nobody uses it, there's no network effect in usage

I think a few years ago I stumbled upon a CMS that uses it and once I accidentally stumbled upon a Website that uses XSLT transformation for styling. That's all XSLT I ever saw in the wild being actually used.

All in all XSLT is a useless part of the way to large long tail preventing virtually everyone from writing spec compliant web browser engines.

> The promise is, "This is HTML. Count on it."

I think after HTML4 and XHTML people saw that a fully rigid standard isn't viable, so they made HTML5 a living standard with a plethora of working groups. Therefore the times where this was ever supposed to be true are long over anyway.

So indeed the correct way forward would be to remove more parts of a long tail that's hardly in use and stopping innovation. And instead maybe keeping a short list of features that allow writing modern websites.

(Also nobody is stopping anyone from using XSLT as primary language that compiles to HTML5/ES5/CSS)