How is it a fair response? Isn't it desirable to have a format that can be used by machines and humans at the same time?
XSLT accomplishes what json-ld and semantic html never managed.
XSLT accomplishes what json-ld and semantic html never managed.
The question of abstract efficiency via reuse is academic. If the XML documents were the ones that users accessed most of the time, or were the only documents available, that might change the analysis. But that isn't the case.
Or we could deprecate support for .txt and .xml in the browser itself, for the same reasons.
We obviously don't want that. It's valuable to have support for multiple formats, and it's especially valuable to have a single file that can be used by both machines and humans.
Not everything that has a benefit is accepted by customers. Some stuff just doesn't sell.
1. Analyze which groups of users you've got, and how large they are
2. For each recorded metric, categorize it into the appropriate group
3. Weight each set of metrics by the actual sizes of each user group from step 1
If some users groups have no, or too little data, pay users in these groups to do surveys.
Now you've got actual metrics telling you how many people will be affected.
Going beyond that, measure how long each visit was, and how long each session was. If users don't agree, again, pay them to take surveys or to watch them browse.
Now you can weight the metrics by how many individual sessions will be disrupted, and how much time you've cost users with your decision.
And this is just the very basics of collecting proper metrics, as done by proper polling institutes. You could contract Nielsen (US) or GfK (DE) to do this for you, they've got decades of experience collecting such metrics for all kinds of industries.
But "Number of page loads of opted in users" is a metric that only tells you how many ad views will be disrupted by a change.
Also, I'm not sure where ads came into this discussion; none of the documents at issue here have ads in them.
You can't just use the metrics of "what do people who don't know how to disable telemtry use?" to make decisions for everyone.
As more than one VP has said at my company: "In God I trust. Everyone else needs data."
This isn't really leading anywhere.
The counterpoint seems to be "well it has Javascript so we don't need actual features since you can theoretically write anything in JS" but one of the nicest things about it was having that toolkit available to Javascript. You can spin up a DOM for arbitrary XML and apply a bunch of natively-compiled, fast tools to it, coordinating and supplementing that with JS. Then present that to the UI as HTML. It's very nice.
I'm on team "the right move is to upgrade these, not remove them".
If they want to remove things to simplify the spec I've got a list I'd suggest, but it's mostly stuff added in the last decade.
As I said in another thread, not everything of value or benefit gains meaningful adoption. A rational actor doesn't preserve everything of value for its own sake. At best, we call people who do "museum curators," and at worst, "hoarders."
That it still has any use on notable sites at all seems like a decent cue to at least try not neglecting it before declaring nobody wants to use it.
... however, it's mostly useful for doing things that owners of walled Web platforms have no interest in, like working with interoperable protocols & formats. They've been killing those through active moves and neglect for 15 years, so why would they do something that makes that easier & nicer?
Outside of the Googleplex, I expect that far, far, far fewer people use WebUSB than use XSLT.
Plus, attaching devices that have field-reprogrammable firmware and have always assumed that the only thing that can access them is software running on the local system directly to the worst parts of the Internet seems like a shockingly poor idea, from a security perspective.
I'll also point out that (for quite a long while now) only two companies produce the major browser engines: Google and Apple. Mozilla Firefox doesn't count as an independent entity because without the funding from Google, it would have shut down long, long ago.
So, anyway. If Google wants to remove a complicated, security-compromising feature that very, very, very few people use, they should REALLY start with WebUSB.
But I think that was maybe just a mistake? Maybe he meant https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3617...
What are you talking about, it’s accomplished practically nothing‽
XSLT is a way to write code that takes one XML file and turns it into a different XML file. Its primary use case is to make RSS feeds look nicer in browsers. That’s it. It hasn’t solved the Semantic Web.