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.

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.

It's literal W3C policy: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co...

--- start quote ---

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors; which in turn should be given more weight than costs to implementors; which should be given more weight than costs to authors of the spec itself, which should be given more weight than those proposing changes for theoretical reasons alone. Of course, it is preferred to make things better for multiple constituencies at once.

--- end quote ---

However, the needs of browser implementers have long been the one and only priority.

Oh. It's also Google's own policy for deprecation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS...

--- start quote ---

First and foremost we have a responsibility to users of Chromium-based browsers to ensure they can expect the web at large to continue to work correctly.

The primary signal we use is the fraction of page views impacted in Chrome, usually computed via Blink’s UseCounter UMA metrics. As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly!

--- end quote ---

I could argue that W3C didn’t follow that policy when they attempted to push xhtml, which completely inverts that priority order, as xhtml is bad for users and great for purity.

But instead I’ll point out that W3C no longer maintains the html spec. They ceded that to the WHATWG which was spun by the major browser developers in response to the stagnation and what amounted to abandonment of html by the W3C.

Ah, that's true. While w3c still maintains a lot of standards, the intention to remove XSLT was sent to WHATWG.

I didn't look at all documents, but Working Mode describing how specs are added or removed doesn't mention users even once. It's all about implementors: https://whatwg.org/working-mode