Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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> they operate in a self-serving echo chamber.

Like HN isn't on these type of topics. Just an hour ago you said that they're trying to kill XSLT because it "not a tool for surveillance capitalism"[1]. A claim made completely unencumbered by any evidence, of course. It's little more than a nonsensical conspiracy theory.

There's a reason all the major browsers are kind of on-board with this, just like there's a reason it never got updated much beyond XSLT 1. If XSLT would be proposed today, adding it to browsers would be a complete non-starter. Newer browsers like Servo or Ladybird have not even mentioned XSLT as near as I can find. It's very low low on their priority list, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people working on those browsers would prefer to not implement it at all.

The funny thing about people stuck in echo chambers is that they cannot comprehend how anyone could disagree with them, so then they reach to conspiracy theories to "explain" this, completely ignoring all the technical arguments.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988418

>There's a reason all the major browsers are kind of on-board with this, just like there's a reason it never got updated much beyond XSLT 1. If XSLT would be proposed today, adding it to browsers would be a complete non-starter.

If HTML didn't exist and was proposed today (please forgive the forced hypothetical) it would be a non-starter. Every tech-startup would instead want you to use their dedicated app. We rarely create shared standards or protocols anymore. We should at least keep the ones we have.

What do you think happened when HTML was introduced? Its not like html was the only thing trying to do hypertext documents. HTML just happened to win.

XSLT is not going away. You can still use it no matter what happens (and it's far from certain something will happen). Browsers are still built on open standards. It just doesn't need to be bundled in every browser by default, similar to BMP as mentioned in the article.

I didn't say that's why they were doing it.

Mate ... Your full comment:

"XSLT isn't a tool for surveillance capitalism, nor for glossy product brochure presentation, nor for captive passive doomscrolling video experiences, so it must be actively excised from the global knowledge network hypermedia standard"

If that's not saying "they're doing it because [..]" then I don't know what it's saying.

I made my point more clear in this later comment thread, in which we are talking, where I said:

> I think a key problem here has nothing to do with the merits of XSLT, but is that some parties involved have no credibility when it comes to their intentions.

There is a long history of conflicts of interest in Web standards (de jure and de facto), and my point is that regardless of the merits of removing XSLT there's a big problem of the lack of credibility of some.

It's that history and credibility that is inviting impassioned pushback.

The dialogue makes a lot more sense once we realize the credibility problem.

If we ignore that credibility problem, we'll be banging our heads against the wall with how crazy the dialogue is.

Once we acknowledge the problem, we might be able to move forward, and perhaps even improve the root problem.

Okay, so you're saying these people have no credibility to their intentions, and you posit some nefarious alternative motivations for removing XSLT. But you're not saying these people (with no credibility to their intentions) are actually doing this for the alternative nefarious reasons that you mentioned. Ehh... like ... what?

You said what you said in that thread. And your "clarification" here adds little nuance to it.

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