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Google is killing the open web, part 2

(wok.oblomov.eu)
418 points akagusu | 1 comments | 17 Nov 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.225s | source
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dpark ◴[17 Nov 25 17:59 UTC] No.45956103[source]▶
This has nothing to do with the “open web”. I don’t know if the people saying this just don’t have a meaningful definition of what open means or what. “Open” doesn’t mean “supports everything anyone has ever shipped in a browser”. (Chrome should support Gopher, really? Gopher was literally never part of the World Wide Web.)

What’s happening is that Google (along with Mozilla and Safari) are changing the html spec to drop support for xslt. If you want to argue that this is bad because it “breaks the web”, that’s fine, but it has nothing at all to do with whether the web is “open”. The open web means anyone can run a web server. Anyone can write a web site. Anyone can build their own compatible browser (hypothetically; this has become prohibitively expensive). It means anyone can use the tech, not that the tech includes everything possible.

If you want to complain about Google harming the open web, there are some real examples out there. Google Reader deprecation probably hurt RSS more than anything else. AMP was/is an attempt to give Google tighter control over more web traffic. Chrome extension changes were pushed through seemingly to give Google tighter control over ad blockers. Gemini in the search results is an attempt to keep Google users from ever actually clicking through to web sites for information.

XSLT in the browser has been dead for years. The reality is that no browser developer has cared about xslt since 1.0. Don’t blame Google for the death of xslt when xslt 2.0 was standardized before Chrome was even released and no one else cared enough to implement it. The removal of xslt doesn’t change the openness of the web and the reality is that it breaks very little while eliminating a source of real security errors.

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righthand ◴[17 Nov 25 23:23 UTC] No.45959626[source]▶
Open wen doesn’t mean WHATWG gets to decide what is and isn’t useful in the browser.

> What’s happening is that Google (along with Mozilla and Safari) are changing the html spec to drop support for xslt. If you want to argue that this is bad because it “breaks the web”, that’s fine,

Not only does it not break the web, they are flat out lying about that being the reason they’re doing it. That is also very dangerous.

You’re doing a lot of sideways handwaving to say killing off this specific technology is not killing the open web, but others are.

XSLT is not a source of security errors and this is your disingenuous argument from last time, (please state if you work for any of these companies). Libxslt has security vulnerabilities not XSLT itself. Futhermore there are replacement processors they could contribute and implement to and a myriad of other solutions, but they have chosen to kill instead.

That is killing the Open web.

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1. dpark ◴[18 Nov 25 00:56 UTC] No.45960212[source]▶
In the last thread about this, I tried to have a constructive conversation with you, and you jumped to ad hominem attacks multiple times and then when I tried to actually get clarity on what it means to be part of the “open web”, you explicitly said you didn’t want to engage anymore (and then continued your accusations elsewhere in the thread). Now you’ve chimed in here to essentially call me a paid shill and to repeat your baseless “killing the open web” soundbite.

Your definition of “open web“ appears to be “never deprecating a feature ever”. And it’s fine that you want browsers to support features forever. I don’t think that has anything to do with the open web though. Exactly like the author of this blog post, you believe things that were never even part of the “web”, such as gopher, should be supported in the name of an “open web”.

> Not only does it not break the web, they are flat out lying about that being the reason they’re doing it.

The library is known to have multiple security vulnerabilities. They have declared that it is not sustainable to maintain this dependency. And they have also declared that it’s not worth replacing it. I don’t see the lie in that. I don’t think anyone is claiming that they actually cannot support xslt. They are saying that it requires more investment to support, and the ROI is too low.

I also clarified this exact point last time. You are willfully misunderstanding the messaging because acknowledging the engineering trade offs here would force you to consider that this isn’t just an issue of lazy developers or evil PMs as you also claimed.

> please state if you work for any of these companies

I work for Microsoft who I don’t believe has chimed in on this conversation, though if Chromium removes it, Edge presumably will too. I have no visibility into the Edge position on this feature, though.