Comment by arandr0x
7 hours ago
It's encouraging to see browsers actually deprecate APIs, when I think a lot of problems with the Web and Web security in particular is people start using new technologies too fast but don't stop using old ones fast enough.
That said, it's also pretty sad. I remember back in the 2000s writing purely XML websites with stylesheets for display, and XML+XSLT is more powerful, more rigorous, and arguably more performant now in the average case than JSON + React + vast amounts of random collated libraries which has become the Web "standard".
But I guess LLMs aren't great at generating XSLT, so it's unlikely to gain back that market in the near future. It was a good standard (though not without flaws), I hope the people who designed it are still proud of the influence it did have.
> I remember back in the 2000s writing purely XML websites with stylesheets for display
Yup, "been there, done that" - at the time I think we were creating reports in SQL Server 2000, hooked up behind IIS.
It feels this is being deprecated and removed because it's gone out of fashion, rather than because it's actually measurably worse than whatever's-in-fashion-today... (eg React/Node/<whatever>)
Yeah it was great. You could sort/filter/summarize in different ways all without a server round-trip. At the time it seemed magical to users.
100%. I’ve been neck deep over the past few months in developing a bunch of Windows applications, and it’s convinced me that never deprecating or removing anything in the name of backwards incompatibility is the wrong way. There’s a balance to be struck like anything, but leaving these things around means we continue to pay for them in perpetuity as new vulnerabilities are found or maintenance is required.
What about XML + CSS? CSS works the exact same on XML as it does on HTML. Actually, CSS works better on XML than HTML because namespace prefixes provide more specific selectors.
The reason CSS works on XML the same as HTML is because CSS is not styling tags. It is providing visual data properties to nodes in the DOM.
Agreed on API deprecation, the surface is so broad at this point that it's nearly impossible to build a browser from scratch. I've been doing webdev since 2009 and I'm still finding new APIs that I've never heard of before.
Some people seem to think XSLT is used for the step from DOM -> Graphics. This is not the first time I have send a comment implying that, but it is wrong. XSLT is for the step from 'normalized data' -> DOM. And I like it, that this can be done in a declarative way.
> I remember back in the 2000s writing purely XML websites with stylesheets for display
Awesome! I made a blog using XML+XSLT, back in high school. It was worth it just to see the flabbergasted look on my friends faces when I told them to view the source code of the page, and it was just XML with no visible HTML or CSS[0].
[0] https://www.w3schools.com/xml/simplexsl.xml - example XML+XSLT page from w3schools