Google Did Not Unilaterally Decide to Kill XSLT

Summary

It’s uncommon, but not unheard of, for a GitHub issue to spark an uproar. That happened over the past month or so as the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, which I still say should have called themselves a Task Force instead) issue “Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?” was opened, debated, and eventually locked once the comment thread started spiraling into personal attacks. Other discussions have since opened, such as a counterproposal to update XSLT in the web platform, thankfully with (thus far) much less heat. If you’re new to the term, XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is an XML language that lets you transform one document tree structure into another. If you’ve ever heard of people styling their RSS and/or Atom feeds to look nice in the browser, they were using some amount of XSLT to turn the RSS/Atom into HTML, which they could then CSS into prettiness. This is not the only use case for XSLT, not by a long shot, but it does illustrate the sort of thing XSLT is good for. So why remove it, and who got this flame train rolling in the first place? Before I start, I want to note that in this post, I won’t be commenting on whether or not XSLT support should be dropped from browsers or not. I’m also not going to be systematically addressing the various reactions I’ve seen to all this. I have my own biases around this — some of them in direct conflict with each other! — but my focus here will be on what’s happened so far and what might lie ahead. Also, Brian and I talked with Liam Quin about all this, if you’d rather hear a conversation than read a blog post. As a very quick background, various people have proposed removing XSLT support from browsers a few times over the quarter-century-plus since support first landed. It was discussed in both the early and mid-2010s, for example. At this point, browsers all more or less supportXSLT 1.0, whereas the latest version of XSLT is 3.0. I believe they all do so with C++ ...