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Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

but why priviligize XML? there's WASM and sites can have any kinds of codecs they want.

unfortunately(?) modern browsers are turning more into these sandbox and state managers with a few lower-level rendering engines bolted together (JS driving the DOM, plus CSS and SVG and audio and video and font and various image codecs and ...)

and if people want to copy the raw data URL the site can show them, plus HTTP provides the Accept and other headers for content negotiation so in theory the URL can be the same.

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> but why priviligize XML?

Because it was privileged at the start and now it’s been a working feature you could rely on for a generation.

> there's WASM and sites can have any kinds of codecs they want.

Can’t js your way into the browser opening an xml document and automatically applying the stylesheet as far as I know.

Features come and go. (Others mentioned Flash. Java applets also were pretty mainstream for a while. Cookie rules changed. There's now more security plumbing, eg. CORS.) From a security and maintenance aspect it makes sense to get rid of libxslt and libxml.

It's hard to say how much the cost will be on users. They will need to copy the URL and put it into some site that applies the XSLT. Likely there will be some page that does this from JS and people can simply make URLs like https://blabla.gov/apply-xslt?xml=....&style=... and put those on websites, right?

> Can’t js your way into the browser opening an xml document and automatically applying the stylesheet as far as I know.

Yes, that's definitely not ideal, but maybe the result of this deprecation will be that we get some kind of handler registration. (Though I saw the comments about similar failed initiatives.)

Java applets were terrible in all possible ways that something can be terrible and it took no less than Steve Jobs to kill off Flash.

This stuff was foundational to the modern web and it's clear the maintainers, who probably are not Steve Jobs, have no idea what will break as a result. If it's removed, it will just get added back in after the outrage

XSLT being foundation to the modern web? How?

Outrage? In this economy? Are we watching the same movie?

(Anyway, my prediction is that likely they'll go with the WASM polyfill if they remove it ... but likely some folks will fight for some budget to keep it around behind some deprecation warnings and sandboxed for a while anyway.)

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