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Comment by hackrmn | Hacker News Reader

Is XSLT enjoying the equivalent of Streisand Effect? Ever since news came out of Google wanting to rid Chrome of XSLT support, there has been a number of XSLT-related news here. I am not complaining, I think XSLT deserves a second life, it hasn't had the scrutiny it deserves, nor its "15 years of fame".

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That’s basically what happened with MathML a decade ago. Chromium had briefly had an implementation (M24 alone!), Firefox had an excellent implementation, and Safari had a decent implementation; there was very little usage. Chromium proposed removing it. There was much kerfuffle. When the dust settled, MathML won. MathML Core was defined, Igalia contributed a robust MathML implementation to Chromium, Safari tightened their implementation up, and people started actually using it a lot more.

Around the same time, Google tried to deprecate SMIL (SVG animation tech), which would probably have led to its removal after some time. This also failed, and it’s used more than it was then (though CSS animations are probably quite a bit more popular, and have over time become more capable), probably because now all engines support it robustly (MSHTML and EdgeHTML never did).

I hope that we’ll get a more formal commitment to XML and XSLT, and XSLT 3 in browsers, out of this.

As an aside, I note that MSHTML supported “HTML+TIME” (anyone remember Vizact?).

It wasn't Google. The original proposal came from Mozilla, and apparently all the browser vendors want to be rid of it.

> came from Mozilla

Maybe they should stop wasting money on pointless, proprietary side tangents before they set out to break standards.

Browser makers trying to kill XSLT is not new: Chrome had intents to deprecate and remove XSLT in 2013 and 2015 (which both failed).

Each time so far, there’s been movement for a while, significant pushback, and the one who was championing removal realises it’s hard, and quietly drops it. Smaug from Mozilla bringing it up at a WHATNOT meeting a few months ago looked like it was heading the same way, a “yeah, we’d kinda like to do this, but… meh, see what happens”. Then a few months later Mason Freed of Google decided to try championing it. We’ll see where things go.

Which part of what I said was false?

Why should the presence of replies to your comment mean that they don't agree with you? Sometimes replies add more context or are simply elaborated me-toos.

This is a good comment and there is an answer to your question. I know because I react the same way sometimes. It's about insecurity. They're interpreting it as negative by default either because they've been treated poorly before or because they have low self-esteem. Either way, their state shapes their expectations.

I think that's the exact point the parent commenter is trying to make. One person said Google has wanted to get rid of XSLT for years, which someone else responded to saying that it was Mozilla who made this proposal, and then someone else responded with details about Google's history of wanting to get rid of it previously, at which point the question around what part of the second comment been untrue entered the picture. That question doesn't make a ton of sense, because if the reply to the second comment was assumed to be disagreement, the same logic would presumably apply to the second comment itself, so the question "what part is untrue?" would be just as valid to ask about the "disagreement" with the original statement that Google has wanted to get rid of XSLT for years.

Of course, I could be making the same mistake in reading your comment as expressing disagreement with the one you're responding to! If that's not the case, then I'll happily accept my mistake so the chain can hopefully stop here.

(edit: I'm realizing now that this definitely is my own mistake, as I misread which comment this one was replying to. I might need to invest time in finding a new app for reading HN on mobile, since the indentation levels on the one I've been using clearly aren't large enough for my terrible eyesight...)

There's a perverse irony to responding like this (besides the fact that no one, whether implicitly or explicitly, said anything like, "That's not true"), since the comment you replied to merely mentioned "Google wanting to rid Chrome of XSLT support", which you indicated was untrue. Which part, exactly?

It’s a parallel universe Lisp/Rust as far as HN goes.

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