Comment by riedel
2 months ago
I would agree to see the outcry more as a symptom about this meritocratic system. I think we are at a point where new browser/rendering engines are developing like ladybird or Servo. An independent group should make sure that they will strive. Making specs simpler can help here. But I think many things are done for the wrong reasons (E.g. Google wanting to cut down cost on parts irrelevant to their income, other vendors that are reliant on them).
Last time I used XSLT in the browser was actually transforming PMML to JavaScript executable ML models about 10 yrs ago. Before that I think it was building a light weight web frontend for our SVN repo. With XML APIs replaced by json or binary formats, the relevance is becoming less and less. And in the end it is about legacy stuff only because there are XSLT compilers [0] that could fill the gap (maybe with a small web extension, that won't work on phones with native Apple and Google browsers...)
Yeah, I was surprised so many people were caring about XSLT. As a language it really isn't very good and I wasn't aware it was used in a meaningful fashion at all.
(Still, it always felt like a glimpse into an alternative, much less hackish processing model for the web, where you just have DOM trees and a pipeline of pure functions to transform them into different trees. I think that approach is still worth exploring and a lot of more recent tech, like React does it)
But I feel the backlash is more a symptom of how the web platform is ran in general.