I think you're reading way too much into that. For one thing, that's a proposal for Javascript, whose controlling body is TC39. For another, this was a bog standard example of a draft proposal where a bug was discovered, and rollout was adjusted. If that's having a "servant-oriented mindset", so do 99% of software projects.

It feels like maybe the disconnect here is with what "servant" means, and with this quote: "the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)".

The RFC8890 doesn't suggest anything that overlaps with my understanding of what the word "servant" means or implies. The library in my town endeavors to make decisions that promote the knowledge and education of people in my town. But I wouldn't characterize them as having a "servant-mindset". Maybe the person above meant "service"?

FWIW, Google/Mozilla/Apple appear to believe they're making the correct decision for the benefit of end users, by removing code that is infrequently used, unmaintained, and thus primarily a security risk for the majority of their users.

I put this in a parallel thread, but maybe this is a linguistic gap between "servant", a person who does what they are told and has very limited agency within the bounds of their instructions, and "service", where you do things for the benefit of another entity.

None of the above reads like a "servant-oriented mindset". It reads like "this is the framework by which we decide what's valuable". And by that framework, they're saying that keeping XSLT around is not the right call. You can disagree with that, but nothing you've quoted suggests that they're trying to prioritize any group over the majority of their users.

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

1. As we're seeing here, browser developers determine what content the browser will parse and process. This happens in both directions: tons of what is now common JS/CSS shipped first as browser-specific behavior that was then standardized, and also browsers have dropped support for gopher, for SSLv2, and Flash, among other things.

2. Browsers often explicitly provide a transformation point where users can modify content. Ad blockers work specifically because the browser is not a "servant" of whatever the server returns.

3. Plenty of content can be hosted on servers but not understood or rendered by browsers. I joked about Opera elsewhere on the thread, which notably included a torrent client, but Chrome/Firefox/Safari did not: torrent files served by the server weren't run in those browsers.

There have been plenty of browsers that were not part of a big company, either for part or all of their history. They don't tend to have massive market share, in part because browsers are amazingly complex and when they break, users get pissed because their browsing is affected.

Even the browsers created by individuals or small groups don't have, as far as I've ever seen, a "servant-oriented mindset": like all software projects, they are ultimately developed and supported at the discretion of their developer(s).

This is how you get interesting quirks like Opera including torrent support natively, or Brave bundling its own advertising/cryptocurrency thing.

I don't remember it this way. It was my understanding that browsers were designed to browse servers and that servers, or websites designed themselves around web standards that were initiated by specs made part of browsing experience that web browsers created.