To increase the depth of their moat. XSLT would allow anybody with a minimum of effort to extract semantic information from the web.

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jeroenhd 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

XSLT is a terrible tool for that job. RDF combined with something like SPARQL is much closer to that, and makes for one of the greatest knowledge processing tools nobody ever uses.

XSLT is designed to work on XML while HTML documents are almost always SGML-based. The semantics don't work the same and applying XML engines on HTML often breaks things in weird and unexpected ways. basic HTML parsing rules like "a <head> tag doesn't need to be closed and can simply be auto-closed by a <body>" will seriously confuse XML engines. To effectively use XSLT to extract information from the web, you'd first need to turn HTML into XML.

	▲	oefrha 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hey, it works great on the dozens of XHTML websites lying around. Dozens!
	▲	int_19h 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		XSLT is designed to work on the XML Infoset, which is basically just an abstract tree of elements with attributes. Which is why XSLT has e.g. HTML output method, even though you use XML snippets to generate it. If you already have logic to parse HTML into a tree, it's trivial to run XSLT on it. Indeed, most recent version of XSLT uses the same trick to process JSON even.
	▲	aragilar 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think it's the other way round, it's XML -> HTML not HTML -> XML.

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JimDabell 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> XSLT would allow anybody with a minimum of effort to extract semantic information from the web.

XSLT has been around for decades so why are you speaking in hypotheticals, as if it’s an up-and-coming technology that hasn’t been given a fair chance yet? If it hasn’t achieved that by now, it never will.

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jon-wood 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I feel like this is overly conspiratorial. Likely they want to remove it because it's a pain to support, and used by an ever shrinking proportion of the internet. I don't even necessarily think removing support is a terrible thing, if you want to turn XML into HTML or whatever with XSLT you're still very welcome to do so, you just might have to do it server side rather than expecting every web browser to it for you.

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mschuster91 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> a minimum of effort

That is not a combination of words that should be mentioned in the same sentence as the word XML or, even worse, XSLT.

XML has its value in enterprise and reliable application development because the tooling is very old, very mature and very reliable. But it's not something taught in university any more, it's certainly not taught in "coding bootcamps", simply because it's orders of magnitude more complex than JSON to wrap your head around.

Of course, JSON has jsonschema, but in practice most real-world usages of JSON just don't give a flying fuck.