Good riddance. The web needs to shed all the old baggages like this to move forward. Looking forward to MCP becoming part of the browser.

XSLT is amazing.

I want browsers to be minimal and simple. For example, canvas should only provide a framebuffer to draw into, and all the rest can be done with WASM libraries. Web Audio should only provide an audio thread, and things like low-pass filters can be implemented in WASM. WebRTC should only provide UDP support, etc.

This would make creating competition easier and reduce attack surface. As a nice side effect, it would become impossible to use canvas or web audio for fingerprinting.

This continues the saga discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185

XSLT is great, but its core problem is that the tooling is awful. And a lot of this has to do with the primary author of the XSLT specification, keeping a proprietary (and expensive) library as the main library that implements the ungodly terse spec. Simpler standards and open tooling won out, not just because it was simpler, but because there wasn't someone chiefly in charge of the spec essentially making the tooling an enterprise sales funnel. A shame.

So, instead of a giant corporation with all the resources in the world stepping in and maintaining a core web library, they're deciding to remove a feature because the lone maintainer who has been doing a thankless job for years took a 6 month break, and has decided to unsurprisingly step down from this role.

I suppose we can expect support for XML to be dropped soon as well, since libxml2 maintenance is ending this year.

I don't buy the excuse of low number of users. Google's AMP has abysmal usage numbers, yet they're still maintaining that garbage.

Google has been a net negative for the web, and directly responsible for the shit show it is today. An entirely expected outcome considering it is steered by corporate interests.

Presuming this goes ahead, I believe this is the first time a standard, baseline-available feature will be removed.

There have been other removals, but few of them were of even specified features, and I don’t think any of them have been universally available. One of the closest might be showModalDialog <https://web.archive.org/web/20140401014356/http://dev.opera....>, but I gather mobile browsers never supported it anyway, and it was a really problematic feature from an implementation perspective too. You could argue Mutation Events from ~2011 qualifies¹; it was supplanted by Mutation Observers within two years, yet hung around for over a decade before being removed. As for things like Flash or FTP, those were never part of the web platform. Nor were they ever anything like universal anyway.

And so here they are now planning to remove a well-entrenched (if not especially commonly used) feature against the clearly-expressed will of the actual developers, in a one year time frame.

—⁂—

¹ I choose to disqualify Mutation Events because no one ever finished their implementation: WebKit heritage never did DOMAttrModified, Gecko/Trident heritage never did DOMNodeInsertedIntoDocument or DOMNodeRemovedFromDocument. Flimsy excuse, probably. If you want to count it, perhaps you’ll agree to consider XSLT the first time a major, standard, baseline-available feature will be removed?

It would be kind of nice if HTML had something where you can make a remote fetch request for JSON or XML data and get it formatted in some CSS-defined way, without Javascript.