[paulvnickerson]

They should switch, then. This notion that we can't peal away browser spec complexity because it will break some websites is the same reason ActiveX continued to wreck havoc long after it should have. I found multiple security vulnerabilities in XSLT back in my pen-testing days, and even if it didn't increase the threat surface, browser spec needs to be simplified anyway.

[troupo]

> This notion that we can't peal away browser spec complexity

They are not peeling away browser complexity. They revel in browser complexity. They gleefuly make browser as complex as possible.... as long as their promotions depend on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989576

[kstrauser]

None of those could be implemented in JavaScript or WASM. XSLT could.

Say what you will about the popularity of each of them, but they can't exist without browser implementations. XSLT can be replaced with a polyfill.

[youngtaff]

> XSLT can be replaced with a polyfill

Show me how a polyfill allows me to type https://example.com/rss.xml in the URL bar and have it transformed to HTML in the browser?

[kstrauser]

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to read an RSS feed directly, although I subscribe to a lot of them. Is that a popular reading method?

[troupo]

It's a popular presentation format for RSS feeds. And you don't need to somehow attach a Javascript polyfill to an XML feed to make it readable for humans

[em-bee]

i do that frequently, especially on podcast feeds where i am not actually interested in the rss entries but in the linked audio files. the rss reader doesn't play those well.

[em-bee]

how do you do that with anything else?

firefox doesn't load the file at all, but loads it into an external tool which (gasp!) is chrome. chrome displays the raw xml.