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Comment by lunar_mycroft | Hacker News Reader

The license would be relevant if I'd claimed that removing XSLT was illegal or opened them up to lawsuits, but I didn't. The obligation they took on is social/ethical, not legal. By your logic, chrome could choose to stop supporting literally anything (including HTML) in their "browser" and not have done anything that we can object to.

iIRC, lack of IE compatibility is fundamentally different, because the IE specific stuff they didn't implement was never part of the open web standards, but rather stuff Microsoft unilaterally chose to add.

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> By your logic, chrome could choose to stop supporting literally anything (including HTML) in their "browser" and not have done anything that we can object to.

Literally this. Microsoft used to ship a free web browser. Then they stopped. That's not something anybody can object to.

> because the IE specific stuff they didn't implement was never part of the open web standards, but rather stuff Microsoft unilaterally chose to add.

Standards aren't holy books. It's actually more important to support real customer use cases than to follow standards.

But you know this. If standards are more important that real use cases, then the fact that XSLT has been removed from the html5 standard is enough justification to remove it from Chrome.

> Literally this. Microsoft used to ship a free web browser. Then they stopped. That's not something anybody can object to.

There is a fundamental difference between ceasing to make a browser and continuing to make a browser, while not meeting your expectations as a browser maker.

> If standards are more important that real use cases, then the fact that XSLT has been removed from the html5 standard is enough justification to remove it from Chrome.

Browsers very much have not depreciated support for non-HTML5 markup (e.g. the HTML4 era <center> tag still works). This is because upholding devs and users expectation that standards compliant websites that once worked will continue to work is important.

We object with our feet, by switching browsers.

What odds would you put dropping XSLT support at for triggering a user migration?

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