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.

#webdev

Should we remove XSLT from the web platform? · Issue #11523 · whatwg/html

What is the issue with the HTML Standard? XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart f...

GitHub

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.

Intent to deprecate: SMIL

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

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/uberprufungslisten/

Überprüfungslisten

Riscoprire con soddisfazione cose proprie dal passato.

wok
(Fun fact: had #ActivityPub been designed around an #XML representation of linked data instead of #JSON, most of the #Fediverse could be presented on the web via #XSLT, without requiring #JavaScript, directly from the source objects.)

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

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/opera-requiem-3/

An Opera Requiem, Part III: requiem for the open web?

Revisting the open web 10 years after the rendering engine switch of the Opera browser.

wok
If I had a more conspiracist mind, I'd say that the timing of #Google's proposal to remove #XSLT support from #Chrome #Chromium #Blink just as we are seeing a resurgence of interest in #RSS and the #indieWeb away from the centralized #GAFAM silos is quite suspicious.
That reminds me, I need to create some XLST to make the RSS and Atom feeds on the Wok be readable in-browser.

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.

#webdev

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.

Should we remove XSLT from the web platform? · Issue #11523 · whatwg/html

What is the issue with the HTML Standard? XSLT v1.0, which all browsers adhere to, was standardized in 1999. In the meantime, XSLT has evolved to v2.0 and v3.0, adding features, and growing apart f...

GitHub

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:

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-xslt/

#webdev #openWeb #indieWeb

Plotting (to save) XSLT

Using XSLT to transform XML data into SVG plots, Wok style

wok

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.

Plotting (to save) XSLT

Using XSLT to transform XML data into SVG plots, Wok style

wok
I'm currently working on the #XSLT that generates the #sparkline #SVG from raw #XML data to make it more flexible. This will make the code grow larger (especially singe I'm forced to use the 25-years old #XSLT1 because that's what browsers support, despite two major releases that would make everything easier and more compact), but I will be able to recycle the code to replace the pseudo-sparklines of index pages with _actual_ #sparklines.

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.

Plotting sparklines with XSLT

Using XSLT to generate sparklines, Wok style

wok

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%

(continues)

(continues)

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

https://wok.oblomov.eu/

I highly recommend looking into the power of XSLT, if not else to piss off the corporate-controlled WHATWG.

Sparkling wok, episode 4

Sparklines, how they were intended to be presented.

wok
@oblomov XSLT was always an underrated tech. So much work is transforming data and once understood XSLT is masterful at it. Data was still so much in the realm of Devs rather than specialists when it came out and I think this held it back.
@sashabilton I still think that the main thing that held it back is that browsers never moved past XSLT1. That version of the spec is painfully old and lacks a lot of essential tools for data manipulation (just to name one: no way to get the min or max of a dataset) that makes it very difficult to use. Had browsers invested even just a fraction of the efforts that have gone into improving JS into bringing their XSLT implementations up to subsequent revisions we might not be where we are.
@sashabilton but then again Google has been trying to kill XML in general for over a decade. Their first proposal to deprecate XSLT was in 2013. In 2015 they tried to kill SMIL, instead of, say, adding it to HTML (like MS' TIME extension) to define interactivity without JS.
After all, the speed of their JS implementation was their main selling point when they couldn't even get the ACID test right («look how fast our browser is even though we can't render shit correctly» —weird flex)