Google is killing the open web, part 2

Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue and I'm saying that as ex-maintainer of libxslt who probably triggered (not caused) this removal. What's more interesting is that Chromium plans to switch to a Rust-based XML parser. Currently, they seem to favor xml-rs which only implements a subset of XML. So apparently, Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well. This is a lot more concerning.

> Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue

> Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well.

> They're the same picture.

To spell it out, "if it's inconvenient, it goes", is something that the _owner_ does. The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". This kind of "well, it's dashed inconvenient to maintain a WASM layer for a dependency that is not safe to vendor any more as a C dependency" is not the kind of servant-oriented mentality that made the web great, not just as a platform to build on, but as a platform to emulate.

> The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)".

This is an attempt to rewrite history.

Early browser like NCSA Mosaic were never even released as Open Source Software.

Netscape Navigator made headlines by offering a free version for academic or non-profit use, but they wanted to charge as much as $99 (in 1995 dollars!) for the browser.

Microsoft got in trouble for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

The current world where we have true open source browser options like Chromium is probably closer to a true open web than what some people have retconned the early days of the web as being.

The web wasn’t the browser it was the protocols.