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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

I think it depends on the spec. Some of the working groups still have mailing lists, some of them have GitHub issues.

To be completely honest, though, I'm not sure what people expect to get out of it. I dug into this a while ago for a rather silly reason and I found that it's very inside baseball, and unless you really wanted to get invested in it it seems like it'd be hard to meaningfully contribute.

To be honest if people are very upset about a feature that might be added or a feature that might be removed the right thing to do is probably to literally just raise it publicly, organize supporters and generally act in protest.

Google may have a lot of control over the web, but note that WEI still didn't ship.

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If people are upset about xslt being removed, step 1 would have been to actually use it in a significant way on the web. Step 2 would have been to volunteer to maintain libxslt.

Everyone likes to complain as a user of open source. Nobody likes to do the difficult work.

Didn't someone step up to volunteer ot maintain libxslt a few weeks ago? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150

Knowing our luck it’s probably Jia Tan.

I'm not that familiar with XSLT but isn't it already quite hobbled? Can it be used in a significant way? Or is this a chicken-egg problem where proving it's useful requires the implementation to be filled out first.

On the link in the post you can scroll down to someone’s comment with a few links to XSLT in action.

It’s been years since I’ve touched it, but clicking the congressional bill XML link and seeing a perfectly formatted and readable page reminded me of exactly why XSLT has a place. To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied - this could of course be backend or frontend, either way it’s a lot of engineering overhead for a task that, with XSLT, requires just a stylesheet.

> To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied

No, you can use <?xml-stylesheet ?> directives with CSS to attach a css stylesheet directly to an xml file.

CSS is not as flexible as xslt, but this seems to be very simple formatting which is well within what css is capable of.

Can CSS be used to produce plots from XML data?

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-xslt/

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-sparklines-xslt/

Do Library of Congress and Congress count as significant usage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958929

Not to WhatWG apparently

What use would count as significant? Only if big corp like Google uses it?

XSLT is used on the web. That's why people are upset about Google & friends removing it while ignoring user feedback.

Yep, there's a massive bias in companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft to only see companies their own size.

Outside of this is a whole universe.

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