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Comment by bazoom42 | Hacker News Reader

WHATWG have removed features before, e.g. frameset, font, and applet elements from HTML. All of them were rarely used and had better alternatives available.

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> WHATWG have removed features before, e.g. frameset, font, and applet elements from HTML.

font: supported in all browsers https://caniuse.com/?search=font

frameset: supported in all browsers https://caniuse.com/?search=frameset

applet: supported in all browsers https://caniuse.com/?search=applet

> All of them were rarely used and had better alternatives available.

"Rarely used" is not enough of a justification

nit: document.applets is not the same as the <applet> tag.

    Note: Support for the <applet> element has been removed by all browsers. Therefore, calling document.applets always returns an empty collection.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ap...

For instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

    The <applet> element has been removed (Firefox bug 1279218).

Also see https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/26850 which removed MDN docs for the element a couple years back, citing removals from major browsers.

<font> and <frameset> are still implemented in browsers, though, even if they are fully deprecated and marked by WHATWG as obsolete and non-conforming: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#non-con...

Thank you for the correction!

So a feature was removed from the spec and it is still supported. I don't see how it would be bad to remove XSLT then?

There’s an explicit deside to unship XSLT on the browsers’ part, from what I understand. That’s what motivated the spec proposal in the first place.

XSLT uhhh notably doesn't actually have better alternatives available.

html?

You're thinking of XML, not XSLT. XSLT is a language for transforming XML into other structures.

But why would a server send me xml instead of html? From the thread you can see that the servers already serve html so why is there a second way to present that content via xslt?

Because you can do things with XSLT that you can't do with pure HTML

For instance, I can provide an XML file that is a list of widgets, and then I can use to XSLT to give you a table with the values sorted in some way. I can't do that with plain HTML, I'd have to invoke Javascript or something.

When you program a list of widgets you can program it against anything though. Whether its xml or html.

Okay, let's say I have a list of widgets that's in an HTML table. How do I sort the list if I don't want to use Javascript or install some programming language on the web server I'm using (let's say I'm using shared hosting and don't have admin access)? I could sort it by hand, but then I'd need to re-do the whole list if I decided to sort it by another column for some reason. And then if I wanted to add entries, I'd have to insert them by hand into their appropriate place and hope that I don't make a mistake

keeping data orthogonal to presentation

How is html not data?

HTML is data and presentation all in one. The idea with XML + XSLT is that the XML contains the raw, structured data, and one or more XSLTs define how to present it.

It's similar to a modern web app talking to a REST API to get raw data in JSON form and then using that data in some user-friendly rendered web page. Except it's a standard that anyone can use, instead of everyone rolling their own client-side browser code.

Of course, XML is so complicated that it fell out of favour, but that was the idea.

it can be, but because it started as an SGML language (and nowadays who knows what it is) it allows ambiguous structures, plus it doesn't support arbitrary tags, whereas in XML the structure is strict but the tag schema is completely free.

Html does not allow ambigous structures. While it has a more flexible syntax than XML, it always parse to an unambigous structure.