4 ms·

It’s interesting to see the casual slide of Google towards almost internet explorer 5.1 style behavior, where standards can just be ignored “because market shar

by xmcp123 11mo ago

It’s interesting to see the casual slide of Google towards almost internet explorer 5.1 style behavior, where standards can just be ignored “because market share”. Having flashbacks of “”

granzymes 11mo ago
The standards body is deprecating XSLT with support from Mozilla and Safari (Mozilla first proposed the removal). Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”.
- andrewl-hn 11mo ago
  Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer. Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.
  - echelon 11mo ago
    Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people. I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google. Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat. If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.
    - glenstein 11mo ago
      Can you say more about the teams let go who worked on MDN and Rust? Wondering if I can read anything on it to stay up to speed.
      - jacquesm 11mo ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819
    - akerl_ 11mo ago
      So the idea is that some group has been perpetuating a decade or so's worth of ongoing conspiracy to ensure that Mozilla continues to exist but makes decisions that "keep Mozilla itself impotent"? That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done".
      - cxr 11mo ago
        You're not wrong. And where philosophical razors are concerned, the most apt characterization of the source of Mozilla's decay is the one that Hanlon gave us.
    - cxr 11mo ago
      > If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust[…] Those people have since been let go. The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses. Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with. (There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.)
- echelon 11mo ago
  Then standards body is Google and a bunch of companies consuming Google engine code.
  - dewey 11mo ago
    I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers.
    - Forgeties79 11mo ago
      Safari yes Mozilla…are they actually competing? Like really and truly.
      - bigyabai 11mo ago
        Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete. Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three.
        meindnoch 11mo ago
        >Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete. This gave me a superb belly laugh.
        oblio 11mo ago
        Mozilla used to compete well but that ended... at least 10 years ago?
        noosphr 11mo ago
        If your main competitor is giving you 90% of your revenue they aren't a competitor.
- _heimdall 11mo ago
  There's a lot of history behind WhatWG that revolves around XML. WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec. I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it.
  - NewsaHackO 11mo ago
    The issue is you can’t say to put little weight who originally proposed the removal if the other poster is putting all the weight on Google, who didn’t even initially propose it
    - _heimdall 11mo ago
      I wouldn't put weight on the initial proposer either way. As best I've been able to keep up with the topic, google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal. I thought they were also the first to announce their decision, though maybe my timing is off there.
      - akerl_ 11mo ago
        It doesn't seem like much of a charge to be led. The decision appears to have been pretty unanimous.
        _heimdall 11mo ago
        By browser vendors, you mean? Yes it seems like they were in agreement and many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation. Users and web developers seemed much less on board though[1][2], enough that Google referenced that in their announcement. [1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 [2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523
- mtillman 11mo ago
  I think the person you’re replying to was referring to the partial support of XML instead of the xslt part.
- lenkite 11mo ago
  > The standards body is deprecating XSLT The "CORPO CARTEL body" is deprecating XSLT. WhatWG is a not really a standards body like the W3C.
Aurornis 11mo ago
I don’t get the comparison. The XSLT deprecation has support beyond Google.
- amarant 11mo ago
  It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil. HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here
  - pmontra 11mo ago
    Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of downvotes. Then Windows 11 happened. Surprise. Actually I thought that there has been a consensus about Google being evil for at least ten years but I might me wrong.
    - amarant 11mo ago
      "relatively" is meant to be doing a lot of work in my previous comment. Allow me to clarify: Obviously some amount was always there, but it used to be so much less than it is now, and, more importantly, the difference between HN and other social media, such as Reddit, used to be bigger, in terms of amount of dogma. HN still has less dogma than Reddit, but it's closer than it used to be in my estimation. Reddit is still getting more dogma each day, but HN is slowly catching up. I don't know where to turn to for online discourse that is at least mostly free from dogma these days. This used to be it.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  - hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago
otabdeveloper4 11mo ago
So-called "standards" on the Google (c) Internet (c) network are but a formality.
waitwot 11mo ago
Interesting to watch technologists complain rather than engineer alternatives, ignore political activism.

by xmcp123 11mo ago

granzymes 11mo ago

The standards body is deprecating XSLT with support from Mozilla and Safari (Mozilla first proposed the removal). Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”.

andrewl-hn 11mo ago
Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer. Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.
- echelon 11mo ago
  Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people. I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google. Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat. If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Can you say more about the teams let go who worked on MDN and Rust? Wondering if I can read anything on it to stay up to speed.
    - jacquesm 11mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819
  - akerl_ 11mo ago
    So the idea is that some group has been perpetuating a decade or so's worth of ongoing conspiracy to ensure that Mozilla continues to exist but makes decisions that "keep Mozilla itself impotent"? That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done".
    - cxr 11mo ago
      You're not wrong. And where philosophical razors are concerned, the most apt characterization of the source of Mozilla's decay is the one that Hanlon gave us.
  - cxr 11mo ago
    > If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust[…] Those people have since been let go. The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses. Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with. (There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.)
echelon 11mo ago
Then standards body is Google and a bunch of companies consuming Google engine code.
- dewey 11mo ago
  I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers.
  - Forgeties79 11mo ago
    Safari yes Mozilla…are they actually competing? Like really and truly.
    - bigyabai 11mo ago
      Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete. Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three.
      - meindnoch 11mo ago
        >Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete. This gave me a superb belly laugh.
        oblio 11mo ago
        Mozilla used to compete well but that ended... at least 10 years ago?
      - noosphr 11mo ago
        If your main competitor is giving you 90% of your revenue they aren't a competitor.
_heimdall 11mo ago
There's a lot of history behind WhatWG that revolves around XML. WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec. I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it.
- NewsaHackO 11mo ago
  The issue is you can’t say to put little weight who originally proposed the removal if the other poster is putting all the weight on Google, who didn’t even initially propose it
  - _heimdall 11mo ago
    I wouldn't put weight on the initial proposer either way. As best I've been able to keep up with the topic, google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal. I thought they were also the first to announce their decision, though maybe my timing is off there.
    - akerl_ 11mo ago
      It doesn't seem like much of a charge to be led. The decision appears to have been pretty unanimous.
      - _heimdall 11mo ago
        By browser vendors, you mean? Yes it seems like they were in agreement and many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation. Users and web developers seemed much less on board though[1][2], enough that Google referenced that in their announcement. [1] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 [2] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523
mtillman 11mo ago
I think the person you’re replying to was referring to the partial support of XML instead of the xslt part.
lenkite 11mo ago
> The standards body is deprecating XSLT The "CORPO CARTEL body" is deprecating XSLT. WhatWG is a not really a standards body like the W3C.

Aurornis 11mo ago

I don’t get the comparison. The XSLT deprecation has support beyond Google.

amarant 11mo ago
It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil. HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here
- pmontra 11mo ago
  Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of downvotes. Then Windows 11 happened. Surprise. Actually I thought that there has been a consensus about Google being evil for at least ten years but I might me wrong.
  - amarant 11mo ago
    "relatively" is meant to be doing a lot of work in my previous comment. Allow me to clarify: Obviously some amount was always there, but it used to be so much less than it is now, and, more importantly, the difference between HN and other social media, such as Reddit, used to be bigger, in terms of amount of dogma. HN still has less dogma than Reddit, but it's closer than it used to be in my estimation. Reddit is still getting more dogma each day, but HN is slowly catching up. I don't know where to turn to for online discourse that is at least mostly free from dogma these days. This used to be it.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago

otabdeveloper4 11mo ago

So-called "standards" on the Google (c) Internet (c) network are but a formality.

waitwot 11mo ago

Interesting to watch technologists complain rather than engineer alternatives, ignore political activism.