| ▲ | xmcp123 7 hours ago |
| It’s interesting to see the casual slide of Google towards almost internet explorer 5.1 style behavior, where standards can just be ignored “because market share”. Having flashbacks of “<!--[if IE 6]>
<script src="fix-ie6.js"></script>
<![endif]-->” |
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| ▲ | granzymes 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The standards body is deprecating XSLT with support from Mozilla and Safari (Mozilla first proposed the removal). Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”. |
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| ▲ | _heimdall 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a lot of history behind WhatWG that revolves around XML. WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec. I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it. | | |
| ▲ | NewsaHackO 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The issue is you can’t say to put little weight who originally proposed the removal if the other poster is putting all the weight on Google, who didn’t even initially propose it | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't put weight on the initial proposer either way. As best I've been able to keep up with the topic, google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal. I thought they were also the first to announce their decision, though maybe my timing is off there. | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It doesn't seem like much of a charge to be led. The decision appears to have been pretty unanimous. | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | By browser vendors, you mean? Yes it seems like they were in agreement and many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation. Users and web developers seemed much less on board though[1][2], enough that Google referenced that in their announcement. [1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578
[2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 | | |
| ▲ | akerl_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, that's what I mean. In this comment tree, you've said: > google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal. and > many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation I'm saying that I don't see any evidence that this was "driven by google". All the evidence I see is that Google, Mozilla, and Apple were all pretty immediately in agreement that removing XSLT was the move they all wanted to make. You're telling us that we shouldn't think too hard about the fact that a Mozilla staffer opened the request for removal, and that we should notice that Google "led the charge". It would be interesting if somebody could back that up with something besides vibes, because I don't even see how there was a charge to lead. Among the groups that agreed, that agreement appears to have been quick and unanimous. | | |
| ▲ | _heimdall 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | In the github issues I have followed, including those linked above, I primarily saw Google engineers arguing for removing XSLT from the spec. I'm not saying they are the sole architects of the spec removal, and I'm not claiming to have seen all related discussions. I am sharing my view, though, that Google engineers have been the majority share of browser engineer comments I've seen arguing for removing XSLT. |
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| ▲ | andrewl-hn 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer. Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people. I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google. Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat. If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go. | | |
| ▲ | cxr 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust[…] Those people have since been let go. The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses. Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with. (There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.) | |
| ▲ | akerl_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So the idea is that some group has been perpetuating a decade or so's worth of ongoing conspiracy to ensure that Mozilla continues to exist but makes decisions that "keep Mozilla itself impotent"? That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done". | | |
| ▲ | cxr 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're not wrong. And where philosophical razors are concerned, the most apt characterization of the source of Mozilla's decay is the one that Hanlon gave us. |
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| ▲ | glenstein 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you say more about the teams let go who worked on MDN and Rust? Wondering if I can read anything on it to stay up to speed. | | |
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| ▲ | mtillman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the person you’re replying to was referring to the partial support of XML instead of the xslt part. | |
| ▲ | echelon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then standards body is Google and a bunch of companies consuming Google engine code. | | |
| ▲ | dewey 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers. | | |
| ▲ | themafia 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do Mozilla and Safari _not_ take money from Google? | |
| ▲ | BolexNOLA 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Safari yes Mozilla…are they actually competing? Like really and truly. | | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete. Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three. | | |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don’t get the comparison. The XSLT deprecation has support beyond Google. |
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| ▲ | amarant 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil. HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here | | |
| ▲ | hn_throwaway_99 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Completely agree. You see this all the time in online discourse. I call it the "two things can be true at the same time" problem, where a lot of people seem unable to believe that 2 things can simultaneously be true, in this case: 1. Google has engaged in a lot of anticompetitive behavior to maintain and extend their web monopoly. 2. Removing XSLT support from browsers is a good idea that is widely supported by all major browser vendors. | |
| ▲ | pmontra 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of downvotes. Then Windows 11 happened. Surprise. Actually I thought that there has been a consensus about Google being evil for at least ten years but I might me wrong. | | |
| ▲ | amarant 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "relatively" is meant to be doing a lot of work in my previous comment. Allow me to clarify: Obviously some amount was always there, but it used to be so much less than it is now, and, more importantly, the difference between HN and other social media, such as Reddit, used to be bigger, in terms of amount of dogma. HN still has less dogma than Reddit, but it's closer than it used to be in my estimation. Reddit is still getting more dogma each day, but HN is slowly catching up. I don't know where to turn to for online discourse that is at least mostly free from dogma these days. This used to be it. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | cxr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. > People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil. Sure, but a person also needs to be conscious of the role that this perception plays in securing premature dismissal of anyone who ventures to criticize. (In quoting your comment above, I've deliberately separated the first sentence from the second. Notice how easily the observation of the phenomenon described in the second sentence can be used to undergird the first claim, even though the first claim doesn't actually follow as a necessary consequence from the second.) | |
| ▲ | troupo an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Safari is "cautiously supportive", waiting for someone else to remove support. Google does lead the charge on it, immediately having a PR to remove it from Chromium and stating intent to remove even though the guy pushing it didn't even know about XSLT uses before he even opened either of them. XSLT is a symptom of how browser vendors approach the web these days. And yes, Google are the worst of them. |
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| ▲ | waitwot 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| So-called "standards" on the Google (c) Internet (c) network are but a formality. |
