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Comment by QuadrupleA

8 hours ago

TIL: Chrome supports XSLT.

Good riddance I guess - it and most of the tech from the "XML era" was needlessly overcomplicated.

9 comments

QuadrupleA

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cxr  7 hours ago

Your response is like seeing the cops going to the wrong house to kick in your neighbors door, breaking their ornaments in their entry way, and then saying to yourself, "Good. I hate yellow, and would never have any of that tacky shit in my house."

As your first sentence of your comment indicates, the fact that it's supported and there for people to use doesn't (and hasn't) result in you being forced to use it in your projects.

  • QuadrupleA  7 hours ago

    Yes but software, and especially browser, complexity has balooned enormously over the years. And while XSLT probably plays a tiny part in that, it's likely embedded in every Electron app that could do in 1MB what it takes 500 MB to do, makes it incrementally harder to build and maintain a competing browser, etc., etc. It's not zero cost.

    I do tend to support backwards compatibility over constant updates and breakage, and needless hoops to jump through as e.g. Apple often puts its developers through. But having grown up and worked in the overexuberant XML-for-everything, semantic-web 1000-page specification, OOP AbstractFactoryTemplateManagerFactory era, I'm glad to put some of that behind us.

    If that makes me some kind of gestappo, so be it.

    • cxr  1 hour ago

      Point to the part of your comment that has any-fucking-thing to do with the topic at hand (i.e. engages with the actual substance of the comment that it's posted as a reply to). Your comment starts with "Yes but", and then proceeds into total non-sequitur, presented as if it's a rebuttal or rejoinder to something. This is misdirection.

      Your neighbors' ugly yellow tchotchkes have in no way forced you—nor will they ever force you—to ornament your house with XSLT printouts.

    • lenkite  6 hours ago

      Remove crappy JS APIs and other web-tech first before deprecating XSLT - which is a true-blue public standard. For folks who don't enable JS and XML data, XSLT is a life-saver.

      1 reply →

afandian  7 hours ago

Perhaps, but isn't the contemporary tech stack orders of magnitude more complicated? Doesn't feel like a strong motivating argument.

exasperaited  8 hours ago

XSLT is really powerful and it is declarative, like CSS, but can both push and pull.

It's a loss, if you ask me, to remove it from client-side, but it's one I worked through years ago.

It's still really useful on the server side for document transformation.