Most active commenters
  • ndriscoll(5)

←back to thread

Google is killing the open web, part 2

(wok.oblomov.eu)
418 points akagusu | 15 comments | 17 Nov 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source | bottom
Show context
dfabulich ◴[17 Nov 25 16:44 UTC] No.45955306[source]▶
In part 1 of this article, the author wrote, "XSLT is an essential companion to RSS, as it allows the feed itself to be perused in the browser"

Actually, you can make an RSS feed user-browsable by using JavaScript instead. You can even run XSLT in JavaScript, which is what Google's polyfill does.

I've written thousands of lines of XSLT. JavaScript is better than XSLT in every way, which is why JavaScript has thrived and XSLT has dwindled.

This is why XSLT has got to go: https://www.offensivecon.org/speakers/2025/ivan-fratric.html

replies(7): >>45955537 #>>45955587 #>>45955938 #>>45955985 #>>45956639 #>>45956745 #>>45958606 #
ndriscoll ◴[17 Nov 25 17:05 UTC] No.45955537[source]▶
> JavaScript is better than XSLT in every way

Obviously not in every way. XSLT is declarative and builds pretty naturally off of HTML for someone who doesn't know any programming languages. It gives a very low-effort but fairly high power (especially considering its neglect) on-ramp to templated web pages with no build steps or special server software (e.g. PHP, Ruby) that you need to maintain. It's an extremely natural fit if you want to add new custom HTML elements. You link a template just like you link a CSS file to reuse styles. Obvious.

The equivalent Javascript functionality's documentation[0] starts going on about classes and callbacks and shadow DOM, which is by contrast not at all approachable for someone who just wants to make a web page. Obviously Javascript is necessary if you want to make a web application, but those are incredibly rare, and it's expected that you'll need a programmer if you need to make an application.

Part of the death of the open web is that the companies that control the web's direction don't care about empowering individuals to do simple things in a simple way without their involvement. Since there's no simple, open way to make your own page that people can subscribe to (RSS support having been removed from browsers instead of expanded upon for e.g. a live home page), everyone needs to be on e.g. Facebook.

It's the same with how they make it a pain to just copy your music onto your phone or backup your photos off of it, but instead you can pay them monthly for streaming and cloud storage.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_compone...

replies(5): >>45955706 #>>45955862 #>>45955946 #>>45956123 #>>45957628 #
1. munificent ◴[17 Nov 25 17:34 UTC] No.45955862[source]▶
> XSLT is declarative and builds pretty naturally off of HTML for someone who doesn't know any programming languages.

Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively?

I'd be willing to bet good money that the Venn diagram of users that fit the intersection of "authoring content for the web", "care about separating content from HTML", "comfortable with HTML", "not comfortable with JavaScript", and "able to ramp up on XSLT" is pretty small.

At some point, we have to just decide "sorry, this use case is too marginal for every browser to maintain this complexity forever".

replies(7): >>45955905 #>>45955908 #>>45956026 #>>45956251 #>>45956661 #>>45957052 #>>45958127 #
2. rendaw ◴[17 Nov 25 17:39 UTC] No.45955905[source]▶
I've seen non-programmers learn SQL, and SQL is far more inconsistent, complex, non-orthogonal, fragmented, footgunny, and user hostile than most programming languages.

I'm not sure what I mean by this, WRT XSLT vs Javascript.

3. ndriscoll ◴[17 Nov 25 17:39 UTC] No.45955908[source]▶
I was such a non-programmer as a child, yes. At the time that XSLT was new, if you read a book on HTML and making web pages from the library, it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes. Things that blew my mind were that you could install Apache on your own computer and your desktop could be a website, or (as I learned many years later) that you could make a server application (or these days now Javascript code) that calls a function based on a requested path instead of paths being 1:1 with files. By contrast, like I said XSLT was just a natural extension of HTML for something that everyone who's written a couple web pages wants to do.

The fact that the web's new owners have decided that making web pages is too marginal a use-case for the Web Platform is my point.

replies(1): >>45955954 #
4. ErroneousBosh ◴[17 Nov 25 17:44 UTC] No.45955954[source]▶
> it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes.

That's what CSS does.

replies(2): >>45956009 #>>45957449 #
5. ndriscoll ◴[17 Nov 25 17:50 UTC] No.45956009{3}[source]▶
Yes that's why XSLT is such a natural fit when you learn about HTML+CSS. It's the same idea, but applied to HTML templates, which is something you immediately want when you hand-write HTML (e.g. navbars, headers, and footers that you can include on every page).
replies(1): >>45956043 #
6. jeffbee ◴[17 Nov 25 17:51 UTC] No.45956026[source]▶
Funnily enough, XSLT is one of those things that I don't know very well but LLMs do. I find that I can ask Gemini to blurt out an XSLT implementation of my requirements given a snippet of example doc, and I have used this to good effect in some web scrapers/robots.
7. ErroneousBosh ◴[17 Nov 25 17:53 UTC] No.45956043{4}[source]▶
Your problem here is that you're hand-writing HTML including all the templates. This wasn't a good way to do it 30 years ago and it's not a good way to do it now.

See all these "static site generators" everyone's into these days? We used those in the mid-90s. They were called "Makefiles".

replies(1): >>45956087 #
8. ndriscoll ◴[17 Nov 25 17:58 UTC] No.45956087{5}[source]▶
Yeah because I was 11 and didn't know what a Makefile was. That's my point. I wanted to make web pages, and didn't know any programming. HTML is designed to be hand-written. You just write text, and when you want it to look different, you wrap it in a thing. When doing this, you'll quickly want to re-use snippets/invent your own tags. XSLT gives a solution to this without saying "okay let's back up and go learn how to use a command line now, and probably use an entirely different document format" (SSGs) or "okay let's back up and learn about functions, variables, classes, and callbacks, and maybe a compiler" (Javascript). It just says "when you want to make your own tags, extract them into a 'template' tag, then include your templates just like you include a CSS file for styles".
9. matwood ◴[17 Nov 25 18:14 UTC] No.45956251[source]▶
> Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively?

Admittedly this was 20ish years ago, but I used to teach the business analysts XSLT so they could create/edit/format their own reports.

At the time Crystal Reports had become crazy expensive so I developed a system that would send the data to the browser as XML and then an XSLT to format the report. It provided basic interactivity and could be edited by people other than me. Also, if I remember, at the time it only worked in IE because it was the only browser with the transform function.

10. a456463 ◴[17 Nov 25 18:51 UTC] No.45956661[source]▶
I did. Just because the herd says it's dead doesn't mean XSLT is dead or "bad"
11. righthand ◴[17 Nov 25 19:20 UTC] No.45957052[source]▶
I did after reading about it. I immediately moved my personal site to it and got rid of the crap JS site I had.
12. antod ◴[17 Nov 25 19:48 UTC] No.45957449{3}[source]▶
XSLT is really separating (XML) data from markup in the case of the web. More generally it's transforming between different XML formats.

But in the case of docs (eg XML-FO for docbook, DITA etc) XSLT does actually separate content from styling.

13. basscomm ◴[17 Nov 25 20:51 UTC] No.45958127[source]▶
> Have you ever met a single non-programmer who successfully picked up XSLT of their own volition and used it productively?

Hi! I'm a non-programmer who picked up XSLT of my own volition and spent the last five-ish years using it to write a website. I even put up all the code on github: https://github.com/zmodemorg/wyrm.org

I spent a few weeks converting the site to use a static site generator, and there were a lot of things I could do in XSLT that I can't really do in the generator, which sucks. I'd revert the entire website in heartbeat if I knew that XSLT support would actually stick around (in fact, that's one of the reasons I started with XSLT in the first place, I didn't think that support would go away any time soon, but here we are)

replies(1): >>45958284 #
14. ndriscoll ◴[17 Nov 25 21:04 UTC] No.45958284[source]▶
For what it's worth, you can still run an XSL processor as a static generator. You of course lose some power like using document() to include information for a logged in user, but if it's a static site then that's fine.
replies(1): >>45958533 #
15. basscomm ◴[17 Nov 25 21:27 UTC] No.45958533{3}[source]▶
Users don't log in to my site.

I eventually started using server-side XSL processing (https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_xslt_module.html) because I wanted my site to be viewable in text-based browsers, too, but it uses the same XSLT library that the browsers use and I don't know how long it's going to be around.