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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Browsers really should have embraced XSLT rather that abandoned it. Now we're stuck trying yet again to reinvent solutions already handled by REST [1].

[1] https://tonysull.co/articles/mcp-is-the-wrong-answer/

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XSLT is the solution domain specialists and philosophers. Abandoning it is the vote of the market and market interests, the wisdom of crowds at work. This is the era of scale not expertise, enjoy the fruits.

Its more the market makers that made the vote rather than the market itself.

Effectively no one was using XSLT at any point (certain document pipelines or Paul Ford like indie hackers being the exceptions that proved the rule). Browsers keep all kinds of legacy features, of course, and they could well have kept this one, and doing so would’ve been a decision with merit. But they didn’t, and the market will ratify their decision. Just like effectively no one was using XSLT, effectively no one will change their choice of browser over its absence.

Blizzard used to use it for their entire WoW Armory website to look people up, They converted off it years ago, but for awhile they used XML/XSLT to display the entire page

Its hard to judge usage when browsers stopped maintaining XSLT with the 1.0 spec. V1.0 was very lacking in features and is difficult to use.

Browsers also never added support for some of the most fundamental features to support XSLT. Page transitions and loading state are particularly rough in XSLT in my experience.

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