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> Removing XSLT from browsers was long overdue > Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well. > They're the same picture. To spell it

• akerl_ 11mo ago
  Can you cite where this "servant-oriented" mentality is from? I don't recall a part of the web where browser developers were viewed as not having agency about what code they ship in their software.
  • etchalon 11mo ago
    I cannot imagine a time when browsers were "servant-oriented". Every browser I can think of was/is subservient to some big-big-company's big-big-strategy.
    • akerl_ 11mo ago
      There have been plenty of browsers that were not part of a big company, either for part or all of their history. They don't tend to have massive market share, in part because browsers are amazingly complex and when they break, users get pissed because their browsing is affected. Even the browsers created by individuals or small groups don't have, as far as I've ever seen, a "servant-oriented mindset": like all software projects, they are ultimately developed and supported at the discretion of their developer(s). This is how you get interesting quirks like Opera including torrent support natively, or Brave bundling its own advertising/cryptocurrency thing.
      • etchalon 11mo ago
        Both of those are strategies aimed at capturing a niche market segment in hopes of attracting them away from the big browsers.
        • akerl_ 11mo ago
          I guess? I don't get the sense that when the Opera devs added torrents a couple decades ago, they were necessarily doing it to steal users so much as because the developers thought it was a useful feature. But it doesn't really make a difference to my broader point that browser devs have never had "servant-mindset"
          • etchalon 11mo ago
            I agree. They've never had that mindset.
    • trinsic2 11mo ago
      I don't remember it this way. It was my understanding that browsers were designed to browse servers and that servers, or websites designed themselves around web standards that were initiated by specs made part of browsing experience that web browsers created.
  • dpark 11mo ago
    It’s utter nonsense. Development of the web has always been advanced by the browser side, as it necessarily must. It’s meaningless for a server/web app to ship a feature that no browser supports.
  • hluska 11mo ago
    I’ve never heard of servant oriented, but I understand the point. Browsers process and render whatever the server returns. Whether they’re advertisements that download malware or a long rambling page on whatever I’m interested in now, browsers really don’t have much control over what they run.
    • akerl_ 11mo ago
      I'm not sure what you're talking about. 1. As we're seeing here, browser developers determine what content the browser will parse and process. This happens in both directions: tons of what is now common JS/CSS shipped first as browser-specific behavior that was then standardized, and also browsers have dropped support for gopher, for SSLv2, and Flash, among other things. 2. Browsers often explicitly provide a transformation point where users can modify content. Ad blockers work specifically because the browser is not a "servant" of whatever the server returns. 3. Plenty of content can be hosted on servers but not understood or rendered by browsers. I joked about Opera elsewhere on the thread, which notably included a torrent client, but Chrome/Firefox/Safari did not: torrent files served by the server weren't run in those browsers.
  • svieira 11mo ago
    A nice recent example is "smooshgate", wherein it was determined that breaking websites with an older version of Mootools installed was not an acceptable way to move the web forward, so we got `Array.prototype.flat` instead of `Array.prototype.flatten`: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17141024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17141024 > I don't recall a part of the web where browser developers were viewed as not having agency Being a servant isn't "not having agency", it's "who do I exercise my agency on behalf of". Tools don't have agency, servants do.
    • akerl_ 11mo ago
      I think you're reading way too much into that. For one thing, that's a proposal for Javascript, whose controlling body is TC39. For another, this was a bog standard example of a draft proposal where a bug was discovered, and rollout was adjusted. If that's having a "servant-oriented mindset", so do 99% of software projects.
      • svieira 11mo ago
        > this was a bog standard example of a draft proposal where a bug was discovered, and rollout was adjusted Yes, but the "bug" here was "a single website is broken". Here, we are talking about an outcome that will break many websites (more than removing USB support would break) and that is considered acceptable. > That's a proposal for Javascript, whose controlling body is TC39 Yes, and the culture of TC39 used to be the culture of those who develop tools for using the web (don't break the Space Jam website, etc.)
        • akerl_ 11mo ago
          Where are you seeing that it’s a single website? Mootools is a JavaScript library used by tons of websites. Also, the entire measurement is fundamentally just part of the decision. Removing Flash broke tons of sites, and it was done anyways because Flash was a nightmare.
          • svieira 11mo ago
  • crabmusket 11mo ago
    https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890 > The Internet is for End Users > This document explains why the IAB believes that, when there is a conflict between the interests of end users of the Internet and other parties, IETF decisions should favor end users. It also explores how the IETF can more effectively achieve this.
    • akerl_ 11mo ago
      It feels like maybe the disconnect here is with what "servant" means, and with this quote: "the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". The RFC8890 doesn't suggest anything that overlaps with my understanding of what the word "servant" means or implies. The library in my town endeavors to make decisions that promote the knowledge and education of people in my town. But I wouldn't characterize them as having a "servant-mindset". Maybe the person above meant "service"? FWIW, Google/Mozilla/Apple appear to believe they're making the correct decision for the benefit of end users, by removing code that is infrequently used, unmaintained, and thus primarily a security risk for the majority of their users.
  • troupo 11mo ago
    It's literal W3C policy: https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies https://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-co... --- start quote --- In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity. In other words costs or difficulties to the user should be given more weight than costs to authors; which in turn should be given more weight than costs to implementors; which should be given more weight than costs to authors of the spec itself, which should be given more weight than those proposing changes for theoretical reasons alone. Of course, it is preferred to make things better for multiple constituencies at once. --- end quote --- However, the needs of browser implementers have long been the one and only priority. Oh. It's also Google's own policy for deprecation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpSpNJ96U8trhNkfV0v9fk/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0#heading=h.83o2xr8ayal6 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RC-pBBvsazYfCNNUSkPqAVpS... --- start quote --- First and foremost we have a responsibility to users of Chromium-based browsers to ensure they can expect the web at large to continue to work correctly. The primary signal we use is the fraction of page views impacted in Chrome, usually computed via Blink’s UseCounter UMA metrics. As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly! --- end quote ---
    • akerl_ 11mo ago
      I put this in a parallel thread, but maybe this is a linguistic gap between "servant", a person who does what they are told and has very limited agency within the bounds of their instructions, and "service", where you do things for the benefit of another entity. None of the above reads like a "servant-oriented mindset". It reads like "this is the framework by which we decide what's valuable". And by that framework, they're saying that keeping XSLT around is not the right call. You can disagree with that, but nothing you've quoted suggests that they're trying to prioritize any group over the majority of their users.
      • 11mo ago
• Aurornis 11mo ago
  > The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". This is an attempt to rewrite history. Early browser like NCSA Mosaic were never even released as Open Source Software. Netscape Navigator made headlines by offering a free version for academic or non-profit use, but they wanted to charge as much as $99 (in 1995 dollars!) for the browser. Microsoft got in trouble for bundling a web browser with their operating system. The current world where we have true open source browser options like Chromium is probably closer to a true open web than what some people have retconned the early days of the web as being.
  • glenstein 11mo ago
    Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project. It's also 32 million lines of code which is borderline prohibitive to maintain if you're planning any importantly different browser architecture, without a business plan or significant funding. There's lots of things perfectly forkable and maintainable in the world is better for them (shoutout Nextcloud and the various Syncthing forks). But Chromium, insofar as it's a test of the health and openness of the software ecosystem, I think is not much of a positive signal on account of what it would realistically require to fork and maintain for any non-trivial repurposing.
    • dpark 11mo ago
      > Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project. By these criteria no software is open source.
      • glenstein 11mo ago
        I would disagree, corporate open source involves corporate dominance over governance that fits internal priorities. It meets the legal definition rather than the cultural model which is community driven and often multi-stakeholder. I would put Debian, VLC, LibreOffice in the latter camp.