The distinction in my mind is that if a browser doesn’t ship with XSLT, then devs have to go through the hassle of adding support for it themselves, but if a browser doesn’t support a device driver, it’s completely impossible for devs to do that themselves.
Without built-in support, XSLT is inconvenient. Without built-in support, things like WebUSB cannot possibly exist.
That’s why I think they can’t be compared directly.
What? If the browser doesn’t support directly accessing USB hardware, it’s impossible to write a driver for it?
Someone should tell the 25+ year old USB devices I use that their drivers are actually impossible.
The context of this thread was “in the browser”. For example, I use a web page to configure my Meshtastic radios which are connected to my laptop via USB. If the browser did not provide an API for web pages to talk to USB devices, no amount of clever JS programming would make it possible for that radio config page to work.