Comment by righthand
3 months ago
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.
The proposal is to remove support and change the standard. Standards evolve. Sometimes features are removed because they are costly to maintain or security problems or both.
The fact is that all the major browsers are looking to deprecate this functionality because they all agree it’s a security bug farm and too underutilized to justify fixing.
> 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.
Don’t do this. We can just disagree without resorting to strawman and ad hominem attacks. No one insulted you for holding your opinion.
Before this my mental model of you was an engineer who’s frustrated that he’s going to have to do work to deal with the deprecation. I can empathize with that even if I think you are wrong in believing that browsers should invest further in support of xslt. Now I realize you just lack empathy for other engineers who are also forced to make real world trade offs. The fact that you happen to use xslt in the browser does not make it important relative to all the other features browsers support.
> Sometimes features are removed because they are costly to maintain or security problems or both.
But the features and tech doesn’t have security problems. The library implementation does. This is exactly the kind of bad faith argument I’m talking about. Please just for one second try making an argument pro-XSLT and then try to compare the two mind sets about technology here.
There is no negative trade off by maintaining XSLT other than not being lazy developers. I have no empathy for people who hide behind billion dollar corporations and do their bidding. This is not some sort of critical situation, this is a Google engineer doing things because it’s easier, not “right” or “the difficult choice”.
> There is no negative trade off by maintaining XSLT other than not being lazy developers.
Only because it’s not your money or time being traded. Yes, if we pretend that engineering effort is free then there’s no reason Google couldn’t just rewrite this entire library in Rust or whatever. But if that were true you would just rewrite the library yourself and send the pull request to Chromium.
In the real world where engineering costs time and money, every decision is a trade off. Someone rewriting libxslt to be secure is someone who’s not implementing other features and who’s not fixing other bugs on the backlog.
Resources allocated to Chromium are finite and while sure, Google could hire 2 more engineers to do this, in reality those 2 new engineers could and would be assigned to higher priority work.
> this is a Google engineer doing things because it’s easier, not “right” or “the difficult choice”.
You keep blaming Google specifically. All of the major browsers are planning to drop this though. They all agree this is the right trade off.
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There's a lot of people saying "All we need to do is maintain libxslt" and a distinct lack of people actually stepping up to maintain libxslt.
I, for one, won't. Not for the purpose of keeping it in the browser. There are just too many other ways to do what it does for me to want that (and that's before we get into conversations about whether I want to be working with XML in the first place on the input side).
> not being lazy developers
Laziness is one of the three great virtues of programming. Every second not spent maintaining libxslt is a second we can spend on something more people care about.
It's a rule for writers, but it applies to software architecture also: kill your darlings.
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Practically speaking, what does "open web" vs. "Closed web" mean in this context?
Is "open web" just "maximally complies with the w3c standard?"
Open web means popular browsers supporting a wide range of technologies that institutions, businesses, and people use.
Not: popular browsers needle through technologies and tell everyone they know best
Does that make sense? Openess on the web isn’t a new term or concept so I’m not sure what’s confusing. It’s certainly not killing off technologies people are using.
What is open web to you? “Overpaid Mba at Google says this is best so you better fall in line.”
> Open web means popular browsers supporting a wide range of technologies that institutions, businesses, and people use.
The “wide range of technologies” is not what makes the web “open”.
The openness comes from the fact that anyone can write web sites and anyone can write a browser that can render the same websites that chrome can render. “More features” does not imply “more open”.
Dropping support for xslt would make the web less open if it were being replaced by some proprietary Google tech. But that’s not what’s happening here at all.
> Not: popular browsers needle through technologies and tell everyone they know best
How else would it possibly work? Everyone has to actively choose the features they will build and support.
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Given that the thing we want to support can be supported via server-side translation, client-side translation in JavaScript, or automatic detection and translation via a third-party plugin in JavaScript... What bearing on the open web does it have to preserve this functionality as a JavaScript-accessible API built into the browser?
I don't see how removing this API harms the open web. I do see how it imposes some nonzero cost on website maintainers to adapt to the removal of the API, and I respect that cost is nonzero.
... but I also watched OpenGL evolve into OpenGL ES and the end result was a far better API than we started with.
I don't think XSLTProcessor joining document.defaultCharset in the history books is damage to the open web.
ETA: And not that it matters over-much, but the "overpaid Mba" is an electrical engineering Ph.D who came to software via sensor manufacturing, so if you're going to attempt to insult someone's training, maybe get it right? Not that he'd be wrong if he were an Mba either, mind.
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