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How is the answer to any question "Should we remove X from the web platform?" where X wasn't introduced in the last week an has actual users not a resounding "N

How is the answer to any question "Should we remove X from the web platform?" where X wasn't introduced in the last week an has actual users not a resounding "No, WTF is wrong with you.".

NoGravitas 1y ago
That was the actual answer, but those comments got hidden and the discussion locked.
bitwize 1y ago
Easy. Just use the GNOME argument: round a small enough minority down to "nobody" and then confidently claim "nobody actually uses that, and we don't want to maintain it, so we're removing it."
- naniwaduni 1y ago
  In order to reach that point faster, never improve the feature and make it increasingly cumbersome to use to turn potential users off it.
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    And that has definitely happened with XSLT. Ancient version, incomplete feature support and behaviour, terrible debugging experience…
Avamander 1y ago
Because not everything should be kept in browsers for all eternity? Thankfully it isn't like that and things do get removed.
- account42 1y ago
  They absolutely should and this should be considered when adding new features. That's called having a stable platform that others can build upon.
  - Avamander 1y ago
    I think you don't know how much has already been removed and we're absolutely fine without those features.
    - chrismorgan 1y ago
      Tell me. I cannot, off the top of my head, think of a single feature that shipped across all major browsers that has been removed. (For example: <blink> was never in WebKit or IE; Web SQL was never in Firefox or IE.) Well, OK, I’ll count SharedArrayBuffer, which shipped across the board for a couple of months before being disabled for security reasons, and took up to four years before being shipped again, in slightly restricted form. I wouldn’t count applets or plugins like Flash, because they weren’t really part of the web platform, and they also still work in theory, it’s just that the plugins in question no longer exist.
      - Avamander 1y ago
        I recall FTP support being very widespread. I'm sure JavaScript support has gone through massive changes. There have been other HTML tags deprecated. There's plenty of (security) headers that have been deprecated.
        chrismorgan 1y ago
        I wouldn’t call FTP part of the web platform—it was never integrated. All you could do was link to it, and then the browser might be able to render it itself (Firefox and Chromium, until a few years ago), or open another app that could (IE and Safari, and Firefox and Chromium probably can still). JavaScript has added things, not removed them. There are other HTML elements and attributes that were never in any spec and were supported by only some browsers, which are no longer supported (either it was IE, or the feature was removed), and explicitly described as obsolete in the HTML Standard. But they were never supported by more than two of the three or four main engines, or if they were their functionality has been retained. So, if you have anything that has actually been removed from the web platform, please be more specific.

How is the answer to any question "Should we remove X from the web platform?" where X wasn't introduced in the last week an has actual users not a resounding "No, WTF is wrong with you.".

NoGravitas 1y ago

That was the actual answer, but those comments got hidden and the discussion locked.

bitwize 1y ago

Easy. Just use the GNOME argument: round a small enough minority down to "nobody" and then confidently claim "nobody actually uses that, and we don't want to maintain it, so we're removing it."

naniwaduni 1y ago
In order to reach that point faster, never improve the feature and make it increasingly cumbersome to use to turn potential users off it.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  And that has definitely happened with XSLT. Ancient version, incomplete feature support and behaviour, terrible debugging experience…

Avamander 1y ago

Because not everything should be kept in browsers for all eternity? Thankfully it isn't like that and things do get removed.

account42 1y ago
They absolutely should and this should be considered when adding new features. That's called having a stable platform that others can build upon.
- Avamander 1y ago
  I think you don't know how much has already been removed and we're absolutely fine without those features.
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    Tell me. I cannot, off the top of my head, think of a single feature that shipped across all major browsers that has been removed. (For example: <blink> was never in WebKit or IE; Web SQL was never in Firefox or IE.) Well, OK, I’ll count SharedArrayBuffer, which shipped across the board for a couple of months before being disabled for security reasons, and took up to four years before being shipped again, in slightly restricted form. I wouldn’t count applets or plugins like Flash, because they weren’t really part of the web platform, and they also still work in theory, it’s just that the plugins in question no longer exist.
    - Avamander 1y ago
      I recall FTP support being very widespread. I'm sure JavaScript support has gone through massive changes. There have been other HTML tags deprecated. There's plenty of (security) headers that have been deprecated.
      - chrismorgan 1y ago
        I wouldn’t call FTP part of the web platform—it was never integrated. All you could do was link to it, and then the browser might be able to render it itself (Firefox and Chromium, until a few years ago), or open another app that could (IE and Safari, and Firefox and Chromium probably can still). JavaScript has added things, not removed them. There are other HTML elements and attributes that were never in any spec and were supported by only some browsers, which are no longer supported (either it was IE, or the feature was removed), and explicitly described as obsolete in the HTML Standard. But they were never supported by more than two of the three or four main engines, or if they were their functionality has been retained. So, if you have anything that has actually been removed from the web platform, please be more specific.