Comment by shadowgovt
3 months ago
I'm not personally in the business of maintaining a browser.
But if I were, and I were looking to decrease cost of maintenance, "This entire rendering framework that supports a 0.02% use case" would be an outlier for chopping-block consideration. Not all corner-case features match that combination of cost-to-maintain and adoption (after, what, decades at this point?).
We wouldn't be arguing the point if the feature in question were fax machine support, right?
Yes we would because people still use fax machines.
I don’t understand this “everything must be a business metric because it can, therefor if I can whittle any feature as a small minority, I am forever correct and just in destroying said technology. Look at smart and savvy I am.”
Totally brain dead.
Are browser manufacturers required to support features forever no matter how low the usage is? Do you still mourn for the loss of Gopher support?
Yes I mourn the loss of Gopher, RSS, XML, etc.
Browser developers don’t have to do shit but it’s against the idea of an open web to kill off technology, especially one that’s A PART OF THE HTML STANDARD.
You love a closed web. That’s why you’re backing Google and arguing for this. I can’t change that there are so many weak minded “yes daddy Google” people in the world.
All I can do is advocate we support many technologies and ideas. The world you are advocating sounds locked down and uninteresting.
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Gopher support in browser was never, IIUC, a w3c standard.
Piecing the puzzle pieces together from multiple threads:
There's an argument to be made that the HTML standard, which post-dates the browser wars and was more-or-less the detente that was agreed upon by the major vendors of the day, includes a rule that no compliant browser should drop a feature (no matter how old or unused that feature is) because "Don't break the web." In other words: it doesn't matter if there's zero users of something in the spec; if it's in the spec and you claim to be compliant, you support it.
XSLT has been a W3C recommendation since 1999 and XSLT2 and 3 were added later, and no W3C process has declared it dead. But several browser engines are declaring it's too cumbersome to maintain so they're planning to drop it. This creates an odd situation because generally a detente has held standards in place: you don't drop something people use because users won't perceive the sites that use the tech as broken, they'll perceive your browser is broken and go use someone else's browser.
... except that so many vendors are choosing to drop it simultaneously, and the tech is so infrequently used, that there's a good chance this drop will de-facto kill XSLT client-side rendering as a technology web devs can rely upon regardless of what the spec says.
So people are concerned about a perceived shift in the practical "balance of power" between the standards and the browser developers that (reading between the lines) could usher in the bad old days of the Microsoft monopoly again, except that this time it's three or four browser vendors agreeing upon what the web should be and doing it without external input instead of Microsoft doing what it wants and Firefox fighting them / fighting to keep up. Consolidation of most of the the myriad browsers to only be running on three engines enables this.
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