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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the major problems with open source development is its hard to ever remove anything because the vocal minority who likes it will hound you. But removing things is just as, if not more important to good software as adding features.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1172/

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In this case there is the vocal minority who uses it, and then an even more vocal group who was just reminded XSLT even exists and is protesting its removal on vague ideological grounds. The proposal has clear mitigations for websites or use cases that depend on it, e.g. a WebAssembly polyfill.

The polyfill is a distraction; it does nothing for the use cases in the wild unless it's shipped with the browser, which is basically orthogonal to the spec and in any case Chrome was not willing to do.

I dont think the web assembly is a great polyfill, at least for the <?xml-stylesheet processing instruction. The better alternative is to just use CSS which is powerful enough for most real usecases.

That's how it happens in OSS development. For proprietary development, it happens because one big account depends on some obscure feature, or because it is frowned upon to interfere with getting people to upgrade to the latest paid version. See also the fabled backwards compatibility hacks in Windows and graphics drivers. Whether OSS or proprietary software has it worse, I can't even guess.

But the argument is mostly irrelevant here. This is a web platform feature. One of the defining characteristics of the web platform is to be very conservative with backwards compatibility. This has nothing to do with it being OSS.

> For proprietary development, it happens because one big account depends on some obscure feature, or because it is frowned upon to interfere with getting people to upgrade to the latest paid version

Sometimes yes, but just as often in corporate world, what happens is that they decide that the feature isnt going to increase growth, so it doesn't make sense to keep it. I think in corporate world xslt would have been killed long long ago.

> This has nothing to do with it being OSS.

It has everything to do with the standard being maintained in the style of open source. The reason why google is getting flak despite firefox being the one to propose killing it is because the google employee is the one opening a github issue.

> I think one of the major problems with open source development is its hard to ever remove anything because the vocal minority who likes it will hound you. But removing things is just as, if not more important to good software as adding features.

As opposed to non-OSS, where removing features that paying customers care about is of course trivial?

> Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I don't mindless comic and its original context, but it's gotten extremely old seeing it wheeled out to justify completely discarding user input on any change. Sometimes an update does break legitimate workflows, and that is bad.

The difference is for proprietary features, you can just charge that subset of users that care for its maintenance, using that money to hire additional developers, etc. For OSS you instead have a relatively fixed budget of time & resources and have to balance competing interests in a zero-sum manner. On the flip side, there's nothing preventing the vocal minority from forking if the feature is important enough to them!

> As opposed to non-OSS, where removing features that paying customers care about is of course trivial?

When the amount they are paying you is much less then the amount it costs to maintain it is, then yes it is usually fairly easy.

I wish my career had entirely comprised of as functional of companies as you seem to work in.

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