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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

Hey maybe the haters at Google /WHATWG can use this library instead of killing off XSLT. Just kidding we all know they’re too compromised by monopoly/advertising interests of Google and their own beliefs to allow such a cool technology to live on; and don’t have the skills for such a thing.

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Chrome uses libexpat for XML parsing, not XSLT.

I believe Chrome uses libxml2 (though perhaps they use libexpat too) and the WHATWG has claimed that XSLT should not exist as a part of the HTML spec (it should and does), so the WHATWG Google members can force Javascript rendering on everyone and secure their advertising monopoly (which is loaded through js). Their claim is that libxml2 is too security riddled and they can’t contribute any work to it even though they have plenty of people and money to help fix it and they just wrote a post claiming that LLMs has helped reduce the amount of bugs in Chrome. The jerks even used LLMs to generate an untested polyfill in Javascript so that they can reduce the absolutely stellar performance of XML rendering to slow Javascript. They also used the untested pollyfill as a reason to remove it.

These are people who supposedly like the diverse web and performant technologies.

I'm a Google/advertising hater too, but you're choosing a really lame hill to die on here. No one cares about XSLT except as a way to bash Google. Killing it was the correct choice. Find a better argument.

No I won’t because I cared about XSLT. You may be willing to eat whatever pile of shit Google feeds you and step in line with all the other people who don’t care because you didn’t use it or whatever, but I won’t and I do use it. WHATWG and Google are dead wrong here and too big of cowards and compromised to admit it. I REALLY don’t care about the social fallout from my words here. The entire WHATWG team can gft. I don’t need to “find a better argument here” because the pathetic WHATWG cowards never did. They were divisive about it just to be divisive and impose their brain dead opinion on the world. So I am returning that logical approach to their “improvement” of the web.

Interesting. What sorts of projects did you use XSLT for? I used it once to transform some XSD schema documents into HTML for presentation, but it would've been pretty trivial to do the same in JS in browser, or Python for offline transformation. It didn't seem like that amazing of a technology in my experience. Curious to hear what you liked so much about it.

I enjoy it because of it’s simplicity and ability to essentially ship a compiled template built from “components” (XSLT templates) that rendered much more quickly without having to wait for JS to load and render. That you could ship someone a tar of Xml documents and have them rendered entirely client side. If you spend time with XSLT you will see it was essentially React JSX before React in a lot of ways without all the cruft. Then if you still needed JS functionality you could layer that on top. But the main benefit being that you did not have to EVER worry about implementing “trivial” rendering for templates at all and the templates could be mapped to much more simpler data documents (XML). For all the good advice about separating data from design online and using compiled templates, XSLT gets a bad rap because XML has a bunch of other features unrelated to it that people use that can be complex. But then why does XSLT have to be deprecated if the problems are actually with XML?

And for the record if they’re removing it for “security” reasons I think that means that the performant XSLT rendering is not trivial at all. I would love to see the trivial code for rendering those documents in JS because I don’t believe it. If it’s so trivial then it should be a no brainer to ship such a thing with every browser. Or if “security” issues are that big of deal why not create a new XSLT standard for HTML that removes the XML issues?

There are many sites that still use it but since it’s a way to eschew JS by using modern CSS + XSLT, obviously Google wants it gone.

I really don’t understand how React JSX gets praise praise praise (regardless evangelization) but the similar technology that was even better and earlier than it is somehow not impressive.

I used it for all my personal projects, single page sites, multi-page sites, sites that required multiple template types, and for shipping a tar of documents. The beauty being that I didn’t need a CMS or framework to essentially create documents that can be composed of reuseable components/blocks.

I was working on a project that used Redbean and XSLT+XML documents to create shippable binaries that were instantly viewable in the browser, but I have halted that project as Google has won by creating the stigma Kool-aid around it. This will be my RSS hill to die on.

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