[runroader]

One person's front-running is another's reference implementation.

Although, yes, CSS is getting more complex because everything on the web is. What's the last standard feature to really be taken away after actually existing in the wild for a while? XHTML and Flash (effectively a standard if not in reality)?

[alwillis]

Using CSS Grid, which we just got in 2017, is so much easier than using floats and tables. These layouts were also very fragile.

Part of the problem is once people get used to doing something a particular way, they don’t want to change.

I looked at a friend’s website the other day and it’s using a table-based layout and it wasn’t even that old!

Nothing can be removed from CSS because sites from the 90’s and the early 2000’s still have to work in today’s browsers.

The good news is most greenfield projects can use floats and tables in the way they were intended, which wasn’t ever layout.

[mark_and_sweep]

XHTML (or the XML syntax for HTML) wasn't removed (see: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/introduction.html#htm...). You may be thinking of XSLT, which may be removed in future.

[runroader]

So I guess it really is true that nothing actually gets removed -- except the one that wasn't actually controlled by WhatWG or W3C.

Is there still a real-world use case for XHTML/"XML syntax for HTML", or is this just exhibit A that no standard can actually be removed from browsers?

Re: XSLT, back in the everything-is-XML days I desperately wanted to like XSLT, it seemed so useful (I was that annoying co-worker telling everyone it's supposed to be pronounced "exalt"). But it was such a disaster to actually write or read and no real debugging was possible, I had to use a LOT of conditional bgcolor=red to figure anything out. It didn't take very long to come to the conclusion that XPath was the only useful part.

[JimDabell]

> So I guess it really is true that nothing actually gets removed -- except the one that wasn't actually controlled by WhatWG or W3C.

XSLT is a W3C standard:

https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt/

[mark_and_sweep]

> Is there still a real-world use case for XHTML

If I need the markup of a page to not contain any structural errors, I often use XHTML for testing at least because, though it's a little more verbose, if there's a nesting error, for example, the browser will flat out refuse to render it and show some sort of stacktrace error page instead. So it's quite a good built-in "tool" for checking that your markup is clean.

With HTML, everything goes and the browser will happily render broken markup, which is probably the correct default for the web as a whole. After all, you surely don't want a page like Wikipedia to show an error message to its users because a developer forgot to close a tag somewhere.

[Sesse__]

Shadow DOM v0 was removed from Chromium in 2019 (with a lot of pain involved).