RE: [xsl] Chrome/blink developers discussing removing XSLT support

[Scott Trenda <Scott.Trenda@xxxxxxxx>]

This isn't the first time I've seen this sort of thinking from browser developers, and it makes me mad and sad. Any time there's even a slight bump in the road for client-side XSLT support, the first thought that comes to mind is that they should simply dump support altogether. After all, if THEY'VE never used it, they can't imagine why anybody would... ugh.

~ Scott


-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Maloney [mailto:voldrani@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 9:13 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] Chrome/blink developers discussing removing XSLT support

A friend of mine just sent this out this morning, and I thought it might be of interest to some people on this group.

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This thread within the "blink-dev" discussion for Chrome's new rendering engine ... examines the possibility of removing support for XSLT from the browser. If so, Blink would be the first major browser to remove support:
(https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/KZ0eaL-3vQY)

There is some discussion of usage on the web at large, but note Eric Seidel's (of the Chrome team) comment from 4/23:

"My suspicion is that neither can be removed from the platform at this time. But both are probably good opportunities for later removal or replacement with JS-based polyfills. I expect removing the need to ship libxslt as part of Chrome to be a small (but non-trivial) binary size win."
(https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msg/blink-dev/KZ0eaL-3vQY/6Yh4qSidA6AJ)
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Perhaps if some people here know some resources to determine usage of XSLT on the client, and/or compelling reasons to keep this functionality, they could weigh in.

Chris Maloney