Google is killing the open web, part 2

Summary

I wrote a few months ago about the proxy war by Google against the open web by means of XSLT. Unsurprisingly, Google has been moving forward on the deprecation, still without providing a solid justification on the reasons why other than “we've been leeching off a FLOSS library for which we've finally found enough security bugs to use as an excuse”. They do not explain why they haven't decided to fix the security issues in the library instead, or adopt a more modern library written in a safe language, taking the opportunity to upgrade XSLT support to a more recent, powerful and easier-to-use revision of the standard. Instead, what they do is to provide a “polyfill”, a piece of JavaScript that can allegedly used to supplant the functionality. Curiously, however, they do not plan to ship such alternative in-browser, which would allow a transparent transition without even a need to talk about XSLT at all. No, they specifically refuse to do it, and instead are requesting anyone still relying on XSLT to replace the invocation of the XSLT with a non-standard invocation of the JavaScript polyfill that should replace it. This means that at least one of these two things are true: the polyfill is not, in fact, sufficient to cover all the use cases previously covered by the built-in support for XSLT, and insofar as it's not, they (Google) do not intend to invest resources in maintaining it, meaning that the task is being dumped on web developers (IOW, Google is removing a feature that is going to create more work for web developers just to provide the same functionality that they used to have from the browsers); insofar as the polyfill is sufficient to replace the XSLT support in the browser, the policy to not ship it as a replacement confirms that the security issues in the XSLT library used in Chrome were nothing more than excuses to give the final blow to RSS and any other XML format that is still the backbone of an independent web. As I have mentioned in the Fediverse threa...