> nobody bats an eye
I’ve seen a lot of eye-batting about this. Although Google, Mozilla and Apple are all in favour of removing it, there’s been a lot of backlash from developers.
> nobody bats an eye
I’ve seen a lot of eye-batting about this. Although Google, Mozilla and Apple are all in favour of removing it, there’s been a lot of backlash from developers.
Most of whom had never heard of XSLT before today - some were likely born after it had faded into obscurity. I don’t blame people for hating Google for whatever reason, but this is a weird way to try to stick it to them.
XSLT is widely used, for example by the US congress: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/
Neither you nor the blog posts author had heard of that before that ridiculous GitHub issue from yesterday. You're all using the exact same link to the exact same page. This is intellectual dishonesty from you, the blog post author and the issue reporter.
Anyone who has read the response to the reporter knows that this is a cherry-picked alternative format. The normal format is an HTML5 page. Search engines just return that instead, so the only way to have found this page is by clicking through that.
So "it doesn't matter because other people already posted this example"?
I think their point was that for everything the US congress makes available through client-rendered XSLT, they already also do the transformation on their side and serve the HTML under another page. Which I think is part of Google’s point - you can just compile the XSLT offline once (or during your release process) and provide the same experience without rewriting anything.
Is your intellectual dishonesty professional, or just a hobby?
More likely the people complaining are those who use it. I've been using it as the sane way to template my personal stuff for ~20 years. It works very well for "hand written" sites. I'm also not trying to be a top site or even visible to the wider world; my audience is my friends and family members. So to me it's a clear "that's not an important use case for the web now" signal.