What the fuck is wrong with #GoogleChrome / #Blink developers and their obsession with making the #web worse for *everybody*?
https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523
We need to break #Google's dominance on the #web yesterday, and make it painful for them.
Ten years ago they tried this shit with #SMIL
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/5o0yiO440LM/m/YGEJBsjUAwAJ
the web standard for JS-less animations and interactions that can be used to build interactive #SVG graphics. That one was luckily aborted. Now it's time to put pressure on them to keep #XSLT in.
Especially if you're an #indieWeb supporter, you should consider this feature *essential*, as it's what gives you the ability e.g. to make your #RSS feeds nicely formatted even on browsers that have removed built-in support for them (i.e. basically anything except for #VivaldiBrowser).
Of course, it can be used for more than that. I wrote about this (in Italian) on my website a couple of years ago
I'm feeling the urge to add another chapter to my series on the death of Opera/Presto and what this meant for the open web
One would expect browser developers to be people that actually cared about the web.
More and more it feels like modern browsers are not being developed as *User Agent*, but as as tools beholden to the interests of the corporations that have been trying to gain control of the web for the last two decades.
This comment
https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-3160242434
is the most powerful writeup I've read in a long while about why #XSLT is worth it, and why instead of actively sabotaging it browsers should keep their implementations up with the progress of the standard.
My small act of #resistance against the #enshittification of the web today has been to use client-side #XSLT for something different that #RSS styling: generating multiple #SVG plots from the same #XML data:
I have now actually started working on #sparkline support via #XSLT. The same page as before
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-xslt/
now features a small preview of what this feature can do, and I can't express how happy I am to actually *see* that sparkline right there, my first *real* sparkline, not the pseudo-plots assembled form Unicode block characters still featuring at the top of my index pages.
It's an ugly sparkline (I'm no Tufte after all) but it makes me so happy.
Progress update on my #XSLT #SVG #sparkline generator
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-sparklines-xslt/
Another step in my path to revitalize usage of XSLT on the web. And before you ask, no, this is not to spite the #WHATWG and their #XML-aversive #JavaScript brainrot, it's something I've wanted to do for years, as documented by my previous posts on the subject.
However, since the corporate-controlled WHATWG is using metrics as excuse to boycott the #openWeb and #indieWeb, it becomes doubly important to do this now.
Speaking of those metrics, here's a few things to keep in mind.
1. Chrome has an estimated ~3.5 billion people. A feature that is used by “only” 0.03% of the users still affects over 1 million people
2. even assuming some uniformity across browsers that million people is an underestimation by at least a 30%
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3. but actually, people who spend more time in less common parts of the web are likely more privacy-conscious, meaning they are more likely to have disabled metrics collection or use a more privacy-conscious browsers, so those percentages are most likely *even more underestimated*.
I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that the million people thresholds is passed even for features that are “measured” at less than 0.01% in Blink statistics.
Why does that matter? Because the #WHATWG using #Chrome usage statistics to determine whether or not a feature is being used or not is just another indication of how strong #Google's stranglehold on the web is.
And while we're at it, for all we know Google might be actively demoting sites that use #XSLT in their searchers, thereby making it even harder for any user to come across such a site. Let's not forget that they've been trying to kill anything XML related for more than a decade.
I've pushed the #XSLT integration in my website one major step further: the text-based activity pseudo-sparklines I used to have have now been replaced with actual #sparklines. Here's my write-up on the experience:
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/sparkling-wok-4/
You can enjoy them all of them in action on the homepage at
I highly recommend looking into the power of XSLT, if not else to piss off the corporate-controlled WHATWG.
@oblomov That is some of the most creative work I've seen done with XSLT.
One small criticism I'd make though: those charts could use a legend, it wasn't clear what the red, blue and yellow sections represented.
I was thinking of making an XML export feature in an application so that you had an essentially polyglot file: open it in a spreadsheet, the raw data was presented as a workbook with a sane schema, open in a web browser, and it was basically a printable human-readable log of the data. (https://codeberg.org/sjlongland/checkpoint-reporter/issues/11)
This is giving me second thoughts now.
@stuartl thanks, I'm glad you liked it.
You are absolutely right on the need for a legend. Of course the whole thing was mostly an exercise, but I'll look into expanding the XSLT to add the legend too.
I think your feature plan is an excellent one and you should pursue it. Even if Google does manage to gets its way over XSLT, and we'll be forced to fallbacks, it's worthwhile.
In fact, the more XSLT applications there are out there, the better to make a point that it's worth keeping.
@oblomov Hello, a question from a sympathetic programmer here. Why is it important to format RSS feeds for human browsability, and why XSLT in particular?
RSS was never intended to be directly viewable, and I would bet that in practice RSS is almost never valid XML anyway. That means it has its own serious security issues when we add XSLT
Just FYI I was an expert user of XSLT for DocBook conversions, so I am decently informed about the topic, but curious where XSLT is in 2025
@oblomov I’m familiar with the technical vision. My question isn’t “what is the correct way to process XML” but more like “how many people would be affected if they couldn’t see an RSS document transformed by XSLT”?
Like maybe I’m not aware that millions of people use this every day? As far as I can tell web publishers have largely abandoned it. We have enough trouble convincing them to use RSS
@neilk there are some numbers in the links posted to the original issue, and that's still irrelevant.
Nearly half of the web is on WordPress, and therefore has RSS feeds, and despite the efforts by Google to suppress the format (this is just one more nail in its coffin) and Mozilla's spineless caving to the Google directive, it still enjoys widespread usage.
And it's not even the only use of XML+XSLT on the web. Now please go somewhere else with your sealioning.
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