It's literal W3C policy: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co...

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In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors; which in turn should be given more weight than costs to implementors; which should be given more weight than costs to authors of the spec itself, which should be given more weight than those proposing changes for theoretical reasons alone. Of course, it is preferred to make things better for multiple constituencies at once.

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However, the needs of browser implementers have long been the one and only priority.

Oh. It's also Google's own policy for deprecation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

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First and foremost we have a responsibility to users of Chromium-based browsers to ensure they can expect the web at large to continue to work correctly.

The primary signal we use is the fraction of page views impacted in Chrome, usually computed via Blink’s UseCounter UMA metrics. As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly!

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I could argue that W3C didn’t follow that policy when they attempted to push xhtml, which completely inverts that priority order, as xhtml is bad for users and great for purity.

But instead I’ll point out that W3C no longer maintains the html spec. They ceded that to the WHATWG which was spun by the major browser developers in response to the stagnation and what amounted to abandonment of html by the W3C.

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.