Google is killing the open web, part 2

I don’t know. The author makes some arguments I could get entertain and get behind, but they also enumerate the immense complexity that they want web browsers to support (incl. Gopher).

Whether or not Google deprecating XSLT is a “political” decision (in authors words), I don’t know that I know for sure, but I can imagine running the Chrome project and steering for more simplicity.

The drama around the XSLT stuff is ridiculous. It's a dead format that no one uses[1], no one will miss, no one wants to maintain, and that provides significant complexity and attack surface. It's unambiguously the right thing to do to remove it. No one who actually works in the web space disagrees.

Yes, it's a problem that Chrome has too much market share, but XSLT's removal isn't a good demonstration of that.

[1] Yes, I already know about your one European law example that you only found out exists because of this drama.

Another bit of ridiculousness is pinning the removal on Google. Removing XSLT was proposed by Mozilla and unanimously supported with no objections by the rest of the WHATWG. Go blame Mozilla if you want somebody to get mad at, or least blame all the browser vendors equally. This has nothing to do with Chrome’s market share.

Google are the ones immediately springing into action. They only started collecting feedback on which sites may break after they already pushed "Intention to remove" and prepared a PR to remove it from Chromium.