dev0001

At the moment, XSLT in a browser doesn't depend on Javascript, so works even if JS is turned off. Using a polyfill instead will mean that XSLT will only work if JS is turned on.

Saxonica is an Employee Ownership Trust and the team as a whole is relatively young (far off from retirement).

"Saxonica today counts some of the world's largest companies among its customer base. Several of the world's biggest banks have enterprise licenses; publishers around the world use Saxon as a core part of their XML workflow; and many of the biggest names in the software industry package Saxon-EE as a component of the applications they distribute or the services they deploy on the cloud."

https://www.saxonica.com/about/about.xml

Not really, because that would add a dependency on Javascript whereas, at the moment, XSLT works without Javascript enabled.

The vast majority of feedback on the GitHub issue was respectful — unless you consider opposing the proposal disrespectful.

The vulnerabilities associated with native client-side XSLT are not in the language itself (XSLT 1.0) but instead are caused by bugs in the browser implementations.

Ps. The XSLT language is actively maintained and is used in many applications and contexts outside of the browser.

Would you say the same about CSS if browsers only supported version 1.0 while it was being used in many other contexts and version 4.0 was being worked on?

Most of the time you wouldn't even notice that a web page is the result of a client-side XSLT transformation, for example:

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0182.xml

U.S. legislation is delivered on the web as XSLT-styled XML and depends on web browsers continuing to provide native support for client-side XSLT. Examples:

https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.... https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BIL...

the hate towards people who actually made the web happen (Smaug, Anne, Emilo, etc…)

The vast majority of comments on https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 are polite and respectful.

Also, "Smaug, Anne, Emilo" did not "make the web happen." They have influenced how the web has developed, in particular favouring functionality and uses that are dependent on Javascript, and neglecting to ensure parity of opportunity for other approaches to flourish.

From the GitHub thread (https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...)

I don't think there's a strong "Open Web" argument to be made here. XML data files being able to be reformatted into HTML is somewhat of an accident of history; we don't have similar functionality for any other data type, despite, for example, JSON files being vastly more common on the web than XML.

Ironically, we would have support for transforming JSON if XSLT in the browser had been kept up-to-date.

Interestingly, "XML data files being able to be reformatted into HTML" was a deliberate choice to support and encourage the separation of content and presentation. CSS was introduced for the same reason but to address a slightly different (but complimentary) aspect of the same ambition and it's flourished. Imagine how widely CSS would be being used if browser support was still stuck at CSS 1.0.