remember how Chrome deprecated XSLT and everyone got insanely outraged over it?

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

remember how Chrome deprecated XSLT and everyone got insanely outraged over it? anyway, good news, the deprecation path now includes a fully functional polyfill and anybody who opens a document that uses XSLT is linked to an extension that will make it continue to work even after the deprecation comes through https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-xslt

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

hot take: it's good to replace unmaintained C/C++ code that's actively exploited with perfectly functional Wasm polyfills that cannot be exploited no matter the status of the underlying library

[dpk@chaos.social]

@whitequark I mean, they haven’t done much more than show people how to do the things they already insisted would somehow be acceptable replacements back when it was first proposed.

They haven’t funded the maintenance of the library they’ve been freeloading on for twenty years.

They aren’t including this WASM polyfill in the browser, so next year you will need a browser extension to read legislation under consideration in the US Congress online.

[curche@hachyderm.io]

@whitequark I just wish they rewrote that too into Rust (iirc they have had some success doing that for other projects?). Alas, it looks like that ship has already sailed 🫠

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@curche XSLT is basically dead as a technology, I genuinely don't see why that's a better way to spend anyone's time than just packing the existing library as a Wasm object

[curche@hachyderm.io]

@whitequark Based on my other reply¹, I think it just got stale on browser end (since I'd say 2017 is still pretty recent...ish). But yea, I totally agree based on the usage that it could be classified as dead (or may I say: doomed (regardless of what has/could've been done))

¹ https://hachyderm.io/@curche/115510435702080789

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@curche i've looked into it previously and it looks like xslt 3.0 is less of a standard and more a single vendor's idea of an improvement

[theidofalan@hachyderm.io]

@whitequark welp. I've got a year to put the polyfill in for my rss feed. place your bets on if I get to it in time

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@TheIdOfAlan it's just one tag!

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@whitequark the polyfill should have been integrated in the browser instead of requiring external download.

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@oblomov i made the same argument for flash once

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@whitequark @curche there's a Rust implementation of it too, xee

https://github.com/Paligo/xee

which, as many things FLOSS without a huge company being them, is not yet complete, but still under active development.

Requiring JavaScript for static documents is unforgivably invasive.

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@oblomov i'm just happy to see XSLT (mostly) gone

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@whitequark @TheIdOfAlan it's a tag we shouldn't need because the browsers could trivially ship the polyfill themselves. But Google has been intent in killing XML (and RSS) for over a decade now, as part of their effort to destroy the open web, so this is what we get instead.

The WHATWG is not a good steward if the open web.

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/google-killing-open-web/

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@whitequark flash is a proprietary technology, XSLT is an open standard.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@whitequark I'm not. XLST is perfect for what it does, which is to transform data.

Much of the difficulties in using it stem (1) from browsers getting suck at 1.0 for over the decades despite 2.0 having been out since 2007 (2) browsers not adopting XQuery and (3) browsers not providing meaningful messages on error.

[whitequark@mastodon.social]

@oblomov flash was way more valuable to culture and art than xslt is ever going to be.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@whitequark but it could never be made truly part of the open web without open sourcing the player or at the very least providing a full specification of the format, and removing licensing restrictions which they chose not to do. The death of Flash is by and large on Adobe's shoulders,

(And that's still no reason to rejoyce about Google killing XSLT.)