Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

I understand that there are more possible uses for the tool, but RSS is the only one I saw someone mention. Are there more examples?

It may be that I don't notice when I use it, if the page just translates itself into XHTML and I would never know until opening the developer tools (which I do often, fwiw: so many web forms are broken that I have a habit of opening F12, so I always still have my form entries in the network request log). Maybe it's much more widespread than I knew of. I have never come across it and my job is testing third-party websites for security issues, so we see a different product nearly every week (maybe those sites need less testing because they're not as commonly interactive? I may have a biased view of course)

View on HN

It's by far the easiest way to do templated pages. I use it for my personal stuff (e.g. photo albums I share with my mom), but I can't imagine Google cares about the non-commercial web.

I think I've read some governments still use it, which would make sense since they usually don't have a super high budget for tons of developers, so they have to stick to the easy way to do things.

Right, that sounds like a blind spot of mine as well. We test nearly only commercial products (or open source projects large enough to get commercial backing), and in private time, of course I'd come across big websites sooner than across small ones. Still, I'm surprised I never even heard of it (also considering we literally had a class on XML and the features, like these DTDs that I never found a use for in the decade since). Sounds like I should look into XSLT, since I also build a lot of small tools and simple old tech is generally right up my alley!

I use it to maintain our product catalog at work. The server does the final rendering of the complete document but as a page is getting edited the preview is getting rendered in the browser. Back to what everyone is saying, this isn't important enough to move the needle for people making these decisions.

Almost every single government organization uses it to publish their official documents. Lots of major corporations too.

As much of a monopoly as Chrome is, if they actually try to remove it they're likely to get a bunch of government web pages outright stating "Chrome is unsupported, please upgrade to Firefox or something".

Huh? I mainly see official government documents as annoying PDFs. Thankfully someone had the bright idea to turn the national law's text into a proper webpage and not use an image-like format for that. (I think regional governments also publish laws as PDF though.) Double checking now, yes: that's definitely HTML and not a transformed XML

Which government or governmental organizations are you talking about?

Yes, PDF documents which are generated using XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects) from an xml source document

Ah right, so that wouldn't be affected by this change because it happens all server-side if I understand it correctly?

Looks like someone pointed out in the related thread yesterday[0] that this little known site[1] is using it for client-side templating.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44909599

[1] https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih....

Would be a real shame if the world had a harder time engaging with that site

(but I take your point that there exists at least government in the world that uses it)

> Are there more examples?

Practically every WordPress site with one of the top two SEO plugins (I'm not familiar with others) serves XML sitemaps with XSLT. It's used to make the XML contents human readable and to add a header explaining what it is.

Did you ever use a sitemap as a human? I've only ever seen it recommended for SEO, and search engines are perfectly capable of parsing sitemap.xml without needing it turned into some transformed format, or at least so was my understanding (been a while since I looked into sitemaps or SEO). It seems to only be linked in robots.txt, not to any humans: https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#informing

Every (Wordpress) site with an SEO plugin should be fine, since the search engines can still read it and that's the goal of an SEO plugin

Reply on news.ycombinator.com