[johncolanduoni]

Most of whom had never heard of XSLT before today - some were likely born after it had faded into obscurity. I don’t blame people for hating Google for whatever reason, but this is a weird way to try to stick it to them.

[sunaookami]

XSLT is widely used, for example by the US congress: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/19/xslt/

[lucumo]

Neither you nor the blog posts author had heard of that before that ridiculous GitHub issue from yesterday. You're all using the exact same link to the exact same page. This is intellectual dishonesty from you, the blog post author and the issue reporter.

Anyone who has read the response to the reporter knows that this is a cherry-picked alternative format. The normal format is an HTML5 page. Search engines just return that instead, so the only way to have found this page is by clicking through that.

[sunaookami]

So "it doesn't matter because other people already posted this example"?

[johncolanduoni]

I think their point was that for everything the US congress makes available through client-rendered XSLT, they already also do the transformation on their side and serve the HTML under another page. Which I think is part of Google’s point - you can just compile the XSLT offline once (or during your release process) and provide the same experience without rewriting anything.

[lucumo]

> I think their point was that for everything the US congress makes available through client-rendered XSLT, they already also do the transformation on their side and serve the HTML under another page.

More or less. I wasn't really about that argument, it was about the intellectual dishonesty of ignoring that it exists.

The original GitHub issue contained that link and was almost immediately answered. Everyone reading the issue report could have, should have and probably did read the answer.

The blog post doesn't mention the argument exists. To be fair to that author, it sounds like it was mostly "oh cool, this exists post", which doesn't need to go into pros and cons.

We can't extend that goodwill to sunaookami. They used it as an example that it's "widely used". Willfully ignoring that this example is pretty minor. (If this is the best example, it's not a good sign, BTW...)

I don't really care about XSLT support in browsers, but I do care about intellectual honesty in these debates. Nobody needs to agree with the argument. AFAIC, it's perfectly okay to believe that this page is of vital importance to the world. But that argument should then be made. That's how we go forward. How we get better decisions. That's how everybody learns.

If on the other hand people only repeat each other's most impressive sounding examples, then everybody gets dumber. We're no longer working to take a good decision through good arguments, but we'd be working to justify a made decision through bad arguments.

[lucumo]

Is your intellectual dishonesty professional, or just a hobby?

[sunaookami]

So no arguments, got it.

[lucumo]

Oh no, I have arguments. But you'd just pretend I said something else, so I see no point.

[ndriscoll]

More likely the people complaining are those who use it. I've been using it as the sane way to template my personal stuff for ~20 years. It works very well for "hand written" sites. I'm also not trying to be a top site or even visible to the wider world; my audience is my friends and family members. So to me it's a clear "that's not an important use case for the web now" signal.