The fact that people didn't realize that a site used XSLT before the recent drama is meaningless. Even as a developer, I don't know how most of the sites I visit work under the hood. Unless I have a reason to go poking around, I would probably never know whether a site used react, solid, svelte, or jquery.

But it ultimately doesn't matter either way. A major selling point/part of the "contract" the web platform has with web developers is backwards compatibility. If you make a web site which only relies on web standards (i.e. not vendor specific features or 3rd party plugins), you can/could expect it to keep working forever. Browser makers choosing to break that "contract" is bad for the internet regardless of how popular XSLT is.

Oh, and as the linked article points out, the attack surface concerns are obviously bad faith. The polyfil means browser makers could choose to sandbox it in a way that would be no less robust than their existing JS runtime.

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coldpie 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Browser makers choosing to break that "contract" is bad for the internet regardless of how popular XSLT is.

No, this is wrong.

Maintaining XSLT support has a cost, both in providing an attack surface and in employee-hours just to keep it around. Suppose it is not used at all, then removing it would be unquestionably good, as cost & attack surface would go down with no downside. Obviously it's not the case that it has zero usage, so it comes down to a cost-benefit question, which is where popularity comes in.

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lunar_mycroft 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I want to start out by noting that despite both the linked article the very comment you're replying to pointing out that the security excuse is transparently bad faith, you still trotted it out, again.

And no, it really isn't a cost benefit question. Or if you'd prefer, the _indirect_ costs of breaking backwards compatibility are much higher than the _direct_ cost. As it stood, as a web developer you only needed to make sure that your code followed standards and it would continue to work. If the browser makers can decide to depriciate those standards, developers have to instead attempt to divine whether or not the features they want to use will remain popular (or rather, whether browser makers will continue to _think_ they're popular, which is very much not the same thing).

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coldpie 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> security excuse is transparently bad faith, you still trotted it out

I don't see any evidence supporting your assertion of them acting in bad faith, so I didn't reply to the point. Sandboxes are not perfect, they don't transform insecure code into perfectly secure code. And as I've said, it's not only a security risk, it's also a maintenance cost: maintaining the integration, building the software, and testing it, is not free either.

It's fine to disagree on the costs/benefits and where you draw the line on supporting the removal, but fundamentally it's just a cost-benefit question. I don't see anyone at Chrome acting in bad faith with regards to XSLT removal. The drama here is really overblown.

> the _indirect_ costs of breaking backwards compatibility are much higher than the _direct_ cost ... If the browser makers can decide to deprecate those standards, developers have to instead attempt to divine whether or not the features they want to use will remain popular.

This seems overly dramatic. It's a small streamlining of an important software, by removing an expensive feature with almost zero usage. No one actually cares about this feature, they just like screaming at Google. (To be fair, so do I! But you gotta pick your battles, and this particular argument is a dud.)

	▲	lunar_mycroft 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It's fine to disagree on the costs/benefits and where you draw the line on supporting the removal, but fundamentally it's just a cost-benefit question If browser makers had simply said that maintaining all the web standards was too much work and they were opting to depreciate parts of it, I'd likely still object but I wouldn't be calling it bad faith. As it stands however, they and their defenders continue to cite alleged security problems as one of if not the primary reason to remove XSLT. This alleged security justification is a lie. We know it's a lie because there exists a trivial way to virtually completely remove the security burden presented by XSLT to browser maintainers without depreciating it, and the chrome team is well aware of this option. There is no significant difference in security between "shipping an existing polyfil which implements XSLT from inside the browser's sandbox instead of outside it" and "removing all support for XSLT", so security isn't the reason they're very deliberately choosing the former over the latter. > This seems overly dramatic. It's a small streamlining of an important software, by removing an expensive feature with almost zero usage This isn't a counter argument, you've just repeated your point that XSLT (allegedly) isn't sufficiently well used to justify maintaining it, ignoring the fact that said tradeoff being made by browser maintainers in the first place is a problem.

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gspencley 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But it ultimately doesn't matter either way. A major selling point/part of the "contract" the web platform has with web developers is backwards compatibility.

The fact that you put "contract" in quotes suggests that you know there really is no such thing.

Backwards compatibility is a feature. One that needs to be actively valued, developed and maintained. It requires resources. There really is no "the web platform." We have web browsers, servers, client devices, telecommunications infrastructure - including routers and data centres, protocols... all produced and maintained by individual parties that are trying to achieve various degrees of interoperability between each other and all of which have their own priorities, values and interests.

The fact that the Internet has been able to become what it is, despite the foundational technologies that it was built upon - none of which had anticipated the usage requirements placed on their current versions, really ought to be labelled one of the wonders of the world.

I learned to program in the early to mid 1990s. Back then, there was no "cloud", we didn't call anything a "web application" but I cut my teeth doing the 1990s equivalent of building online tools and "web apps." Because everything was self-hosted, the companies I worked for valued portability because there was customer demand. Standardization was sought as a way to streamline business efficiency. As a young developer, I came to value standardization for the benefits that it offered me as a developer.

But back then, as well as today, if you looked at the very recent history of computing; you had big endian vs little endian CPUs to support, you had a dozen flavours of proprietary UNIX operating systems - each with their own vendor-lock-in features; while SQL was standard, every single RDBMS vendor had their own proprietary features that they were all too happy for you to use in order to try and lock consumers into their systems.

It can be argued that part of what has made Microsoft Windows so popular throughout the ages is the tremendous amount of effort that Microsoft goes through to support backwards compatibility. But even despite that effort, backwards compatibility with applications built for earlier version of Windows can still be hit or miss.

For better or worse, breaking changes are just part and parcel of computing. To try and impose some concept of a "contract" on the Internet to support backwards compatibility, even if you mean it purely figuratively, is a bit silly. The reason we have as much backwards compatibility as we do is largely historical and always driven by business goals and requirements, as dictated by customers. If only an extreme minority of "customers" require native xslt support in the web browser, to use today's example, it makes zero business sense to pour resources into maintaining it.

	▲	lunar_mycroft 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The fact that you put "contract" in quotes suggests that you know there really is no such thing. It's in quotes because people seem keen to remind everyone that there's no legal obligation on the part of the browser makers not to break backwards compatibility. The reasoning seems to be that if we can't sue google for a given action, that action must be fine and the people objecting to it must be wrong. I take a rather dim view of this line of reasoning. > The reason we have as much backwards compatibility as we do is largely historical and always driven by business goals and requirements, as dictated by customers. As you yourself pointed out, the web is a giant pile of cobbled together technologies that all seemed like a good idea at the time. If breaking changes were an option, there is a _long_ list of potential depreciation to pick from which would greatly simplify development of both browsers and websites/apps. Further, new features/standards would be able to be added with much less care, since if problems were found in those standards they could be removed/reworked. Despite those huge benefits, no such changes are/should be made, because the costs breaking backwards compatibility are just that high. Maintaining the implied promise that software written for the web will continue to work is a business requirement, because it's crucial for the long term health of the ecosystem.