6 ms·

I think this discussion is quite reasonable, but it also highlights the power imbalance: If this stuff is decided in closed meetings and the bug trackers are no

by xg15 1y ago

I think this discussion is quite reasonable, but it also highlights the power imbalance: If this stuff is decided in closed meetings and the bug trackers are not supposed to be places for community feedback, where can the community influence such decisions?

spankalee 1y ago
Community feedback is usually very ad hoc. Platform PMs will work with major sites, framework maintainers, and sometimes do discussions and polls on social sites. IOW, they try to go where the community that uses the features are, rather than stay on GitHub in the spec issues.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Although in this case, it seems more like they are trying to go where the community that uses the feature isn't.
sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]
jchw 1y ago
I think it depends on the spec. Some of the working groups still have mailing lists, some of them have GitHub issues. To be completely honest, though, I'm not sure what people expect to get out of it. I dug into this a while ago for a rather silly reason and I found that it's very inside baseball, and unless you really wanted to get invested in it it seems like it'd be hard to meaningfully contribute. To be honest if people are very upset about a feature that might be added or a feature that might be removed the right thing to do is probably to literally just raise it publicly, organize supporters and generally act in protest. Google may have a lot of control over the web, but note that WEI still didn't ship.
- bawolff 1y ago
  If people are upset about xslt being removed, step 1 would have been to actually use it in a significant way on the web. Step 2 would have been to volunteer to maintain libxslt. Everyone likes to complain as a user of open source. Nobody likes to do the difficult work.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - starkparker 1y ago
    Didn't someone step up to volunteer ot maintain libxslt a few weeks ago? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150
    - moomin 1y ago
      Knowing our luck it’s probably Jia Tan.
  - rendaw 1y ago
    I'm not that familiar with XSLT but isn't it already quite hobbled? Can it be used in a significant way? Or is this a chicken-egg problem where proving it's useful requires the implementation to be filled out first.
    - phatskat 1y ago
      On the link in the post you can scroll down to someone’s comment with a few links to XSLT in action. It’s been years since I’ve touched it, but clicking the congressional bill XML link and seeing a perfectly formatted and readable page reminded me of exactly why XSLT has a place. To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied - this could of course be backend or frontend, either way it’s a lot of engineering overhead for a task that, with XSLT, requires just a stylesheet.
mr_toad 1y ago
WhatWG has a fairly well documented process for feature requests. Issues are not usually decided in closed meetings. But there’s a difference between constructive discussion and the stubborn shameless entitlement that some members of the community are displaying in their comments. https://blog.whatwg.org/staged-proposals-at-the-whatwg https://blog.whatwg.org/staged-proposals-at-the-whatwg
- troupo 1y ago
  No. WhatWG only has a process for adding and approving features. It has no process for discussing removal of features or for speaking out against a feature
8NNTt8z3QvLT8tp 1y ago
Fwiw the meetings aren't closed, unlike w3c the whatwg doesn't require paid membership to attend. The bug trackers are also a fine place to provide community feedback. For example there's plenty of comments providing use cases that weren't hidden. But if you read the hidden ones (especially on the issue rather than PR) there's some truly unhinged commentary that rightly resulted in being hidden and unfortunately locking of the thread. Ultimately the way the community can influence decisions is to not be completely unhinged. Like someone else said the other way would be to just use XSLT in the first place.
jerf 1y ago
Honestly, your chance to impact this decision was when you decided what technologies to use on your website, and then statistically speaking [1], chose not to use XSLT in the browser. If the web used it like crazy we would not be having this conversation. Your other opportunity is to put together a credible plan to resource the XSLT implementations in the various browsers. I underline, highlight, bold, and italicize the word "credible" here. You are facing an extremely uphill battle from the visible lack of support for the development; any truly credible offer should have come many years ago. Big projects are well aware of the utility of last-minute, emotionally-driven offers of support in the midst of a burst of publicity, viz, effectively zero. I don't know that the power is as imbalanced as people think here so much as a very long and drawn out conversation has been had by the web as a whole, on the whole the web has agreed this is not a terribly useful technology by vast bulk of implementation work, and this is the final closing chapter where the browsers are basically implementing the will of the web. The standard for removal isn't "literally 0 usage in the entire world", and whatever the standard is, if XSLT isn't on the "remove" side of it, that would just be a sign it needs to be tuned up because XSLT is a complete non-entity on the web. If you are not feeling like your voice is being respected it's because it's one of literally millions upon millions; what do you expect? [1]: I know exceptions are reading this post, but you are exceptions. And not terribly common ones.
- xg15 1y ago
  That's not completely wrong, but also misses some nuance. E.g. the thread mentions the fact that web support is still stuck at XSLT 1.0 as a reason for removal. But as far as I know, there were absolutely zero efforts by browser vendors before to support newer versions of the language, while there was enormous energy to improve JavaScript. I don't want to imply that if they had just added support for XSLT 3.0 then everyone would be using XSLT instead of JavaScript today and the latest SIMD optimizations of Chrome's XPath pipeline would make the HN front-page. The language is just too bad for that. But I think it's true that there exists a feedback loop: Browsers can and do influence how much a technology is adopted, by making the tech less or more painful to use. Then turning around and saying no one is using the tech, so we'll remove it, is a bit dishonest.
  - 1y ago
ttepasse 1y ago
There isn't one. It's Google's web now. You should be thankful that you are still allowed to use it.

by xg15 1y ago

spankalee 1y ago

Community feedback is usually very ad hoc. Platform PMs will work with major sites, framework maintainers, and sometimes do discussions and polls on social sites. IOW, they try to go where the community that uses the features are, rather than stay on GitHub in the spec issues.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
NoGravitas 1y ago
Although in this case, it seems more like they are trying to go where the community that uses the feature isn't.

sieabahlpark 1y ago

[dead]

jchw 1y ago

I think it depends on the spec. Some of the working groups still have mailing lists, some of them have GitHub issues. To be completely honest, though, I'm not sure what people expect to get out of it. I dug into this a while ago for a rather silly reason and I found that it's very inside baseball, and unless you really wanted to get invested in it it seems like it'd be hard to meaningfully contribute. To be honest if people are very upset about a feature that might be added or a feature that might be removed the right thing to do is probably to literally just raise it publicly, organize supporters and generally act in protest. Google may have a lot of control over the web, but note that WEI still didn't ship.

bawolff 1y ago
If people are upset about xslt being removed, step 1 would have been to actually use it in a significant way on the web. Step 2 would have been to volunteer to maintain libxslt. Everyone likes to complain as a user of open source. Nobody likes to do the difficult work.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- starkparker 1y ago
  Didn't someone step up to volunteer ot maintain libxslt a few weeks ago? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxslt/-/issues/150
  - moomin 1y ago
    Knowing our luck it’s probably Jia Tan.
- rendaw 1y ago
  I'm not that familiar with XSLT but isn't it already quite hobbled? Can it be used in a significant way? Or is this a chicken-egg problem where proving it's useful requires the implementation to be filled out first.
  - phatskat 1y ago
    On the link in the post you can scroll down to someone’s comment with a few links to XSLT in action. It’s been years since I’ve touched it, but clicking the congressional bill XML link and seeing a perfectly formatted and readable page reminded me of exactly why XSLT has a place. To do the same thing without it, you’d need some other engine to parse the XML, convert it to HTML, and then ensure the proper styles get applied - this could of course be backend or frontend, either way it’s a lot of engineering overhead for a task that, with XSLT, requires just a stylesheet.

mr_toad 1y ago

WhatWG has a fairly well documented process for feature requests. Issues are not usually decided in closed meetings. But there’s a difference between constructive discussion and the stubborn shameless entitlement that some members of the community are displaying in their comments. https://blog.whatwg.org/staged-proposals-at-the-whatwg https://blog.whatwg.org/staged-proposals-at-the-whatwg

troupo 1y ago
No. WhatWG only has a process for adding and approving features. It has no process for discussing removal of features or for speaking out against a feature

8NNTt8z3QvLT8tp 1y ago

Fwiw the meetings aren't closed, unlike w3c the whatwg doesn't require paid membership to attend. The bug trackers are also a fine place to provide community feedback. For example there's plenty of comments providing use cases that weren't hidden. But if you read the hidden ones (especially on the issue rather than PR) there's some truly unhinged commentary that rightly resulted in being hidden and unfortunately locking of the thread. Ultimately the way the community can influence decisions is to not be completely unhinged. Like someone else said the other way would be to just use XSLT in the first place.

jerf 1y ago

Honestly, your chance to impact this decision was when you decided what technologies to use on your website, and then statistically speaking [1], chose not to use XSLT in the browser. If the web used it like crazy we would not be having this conversation. Your other opportunity is to put together a credible plan to resource the XSLT implementations in the various browsers. I underline, highlight, bold, and italicize the word "credible" here. You are facing an extremely uphill battle from the visible lack of support for the development; any truly credible offer should have come many years ago. Big projects are well aware of the utility of last-minute, emotionally-driven offers of support in the midst of a burst of publicity, viz, effectively zero. I don't know that the power is as imbalanced as people think here so much as a very long and drawn out conversation has been had by the web as a whole, on the whole the web has agreed this is not a terribly useful technology by vast bulk of implementation work, and this is the final closing chapter where the browsers are basically implementing the will of the web. The standard for removal isn't "literally 0 usage in the entire world", and whatever the standard is, if XSLT isn't on the "remove" side of it, that would just be a sign it needs to be tuned up because XSLT is a complete non-entity on the web. If you are not feeling like your voice is being respected it's because it's one of literally millions upon millions; what do you expect? [1]: I know exceptions are reading this post, but you are exceptions. And not terribly common ones.

xg15 1y ago
That's not completely wrong, but also misses some nuance. E.g. the thread mentions the fact that web support is still stuck at XSLT 1.0 as a reason for removal. But as far as I know, there were absolutely zero efforts by browser vendors before to support newer versions of the language, while there was enormous energy to improve JavaScript. I don't want to imply that if they had just added support for XSLT 3.0 then everyone would be using XSLT instead of JavaScript today and the latest SIMD optimizations of Chrome's XPath pipeline would make the HN front-page. The language is just too bad for that. But I think it's true that there exists a feedback loop: Browsers can and do influence how much a technology is adopted, by making the tech less or more painful to use. Then turning around and saying no one is using the tech, so we'll remove it, is a bit dishonest.
- 1y ago

ttepasse 1y ago

There isn't one. It's Google's web now. You should be thankful that you are still allowed to use it.