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418 points akagusu | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.243s | source
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nwellnhof ◴[] No.45955183[source]
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.
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svieira ◴[] No.45955425[source]
> 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.

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akerl_ ◴[] No.45955543[source]
Can you cite where this "servant-oriented" mentality is from? I don't recall a part of the web where browser developers were viewed as not having agency about what code they ship in their software.
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hluska ◴[] No.45957759[source]
I’ve never heard of servant oriented, but I understand the point. Browsers process and render whatever the server returns. Whether they’re advertisements that download malware or a long rambling page on whatever I’m interested in now, browsers really don’t have much control over what they run.
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1. akerl_ ◴[] No.45957867[source]
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.