Bless the Internet Archive for basically hosting a second copy of the internet with sufficient bandwidth to serve whatever is currently down, while this single site didn't survive the traffic it got individually
The article says as much in the opening. It also includes a statement from Microsoft noting they do not intend to carry this forward separately, with a salient comment in one of the Microsoft page citations:
> For functionality and compatibility reasons, Microsoft Edge adopts nearly all of the Chromium project's changes to the web platform. However, Microsoft retains full control of the Microsoft Edge browser and may defer or reject changes. The Microsoft Edge team decides if the change benefits browser users.
Edge has a separate feature set and deprecation cycle on top of Chromium hence it doesn't make sense to name it separately? I'm not sure I quite follow that logic. Not that it's exactly a shock they don't care about XSLT (how many do these does) but it's not like Chromium browsers which do more than only follow what upstream code changes are made is a new concept.
Everyone likes to have their private branch, until they discover how many hours they need to keep up with upstream, especially if upstream doesn't care one iota about them.
Chromium, not Chrome. Chrome itself is a proprietary browser with many additional features on top of Chromimum other Chromium browsers often have to reimplement, such as playing DRM content or extensions stores, which might be adding to the confusion here.
I've been doing it for 5 years as one dude, it just got a lot easier with LLMs recently though.
Shame back in the XHTML days XSLT was a spec that could have made website modularity so much cleaner. I once created an early website creation tool that merged separate components using XSLT it was really powerful in the days before javascript was usable without jQuery. However XHTML was dropped in favor of HTML5 and XSLT was pretty much useless after that. Its done well to survive this long I presume it was mainly kept to style XML files.
HTML5 could have taken the extra step of defining a canonical XML or XML-compatible DOM encoding, or at least encouraged it. But the anti-XML sentiment was explicit and spiteful. Still, popular XSLT processors are built to consume and even produce HTML5, I'm just not sure how thorough those capabilities are or whether they're based on any formal or informal standards. (Maybe the W3C has/had something like that, as part of it's attempts to rollup HTML5 snapshots into versioned standards?)
I lost any enthusiasm for XML after my experience with WDDX and XML-RPC, but as a foundation for HTML it was the best thing going. And maybe still is, given the absence of cross-toolchain contenders? Ditto for XSLT, at least if disregarding the choice to make the syntax homoiconic. In fact I circled back to XSLT long after it was clear it was a dead end. A good tool is a good tool, and the fact it remains so despite the wanton neglect only proves it.
That is one, but not the only thing. Non-xml html is just generally more forgiving.
If you make a mistake and use incorrect syntax in html, the browser will do its best to recover. In xhtml, it would just completely fail. Which approach is better is debatable.
i think xhtml happened before the wider world of web devs were ready for it. Component based architectures took longer to be adopted than I certainly expected.
It might actually work if reintroduced these days as long as we can consider many components to be valid documents.
> XHTML was dropped in favor of HTML5 and XSLT was pretty much useless after that
Client-side XSLT was always pretty useless, but I dont see what HTML5 has to do with it?
The only real use case for client-side XSLT was for styling/layout back before CSS became widely supported. Improvements in CSS support made XSLT unnecessary.
It is wild to look back at XHTML and see that the W3C were entirely correct about XML. They envisaged a world of schemas, client side templating, custom elements, dynamic forms, the works.
Alas, for laughably bad reasons we had to scrap all that for HTML5, Javascript and CSS; a stack so awful that most devs doing anything on the frontend immediately scramble to React, TypeScript, Tailwind, whatever it takes to avoid the underlying garbage.
A horrid state of affairs that will only get worse as time goes on.
The XHTML/XML/XSLT tooling was bad, and XSLT was hard to reason about. That meant that amateurs had no way to learn it, and those amateurs went to school and became the workforce.
The web became a winner because it was easy to get something working. And then Google made it a mission to make great developer tools in everyone's hands for free.
I think in 2026 we could build the tooling around a better experience, but it would require thinking about the developer experience first.
You could do some awesome things with XML/XSL. My favorite was RSS feeds or OPML collections of RSS feeds (both flavors of XML) calling an XSL transformation when viewed in a web browser instead of mined by computers for data; same with TEI files, although that was a bit more arcane. The idea was that you'd have one data file for machine use and a way to present that data to humans as a web page.
But, as a stack, the XML/XSL/XPath/etc combination was weak because XSLT was hard to comprehend and never updated. No browser supports XSLT 2 or 3; they froze support with 1. XSLT 2 was 2007, a year before HTML 5 was a thing, yet it never got picked up by browsers. Javascript was just easier to understand than XSLT. Development of XHTML was also glacial, and people wanted new tags, especially for video.
> XSLT 2 was 2007, a year before HTML 5 was a thing, yet it never got picked up by browsers. Javascript was just easier to understand than XSLT.
Turns out that tasks easily done by programming languages are best done by programming languages. Who knew?
JSON allowing frontends and backends to communicate in a way analogous to the "smart endpoints, dumb pipes" model for networking saved the Web. The XML adherents wanted the inverted model, which was always insanely difficult to reason about and led to entirely XML-specific security threats.
I can't help but agree, and sometimes I think about the alternate version of the web where XML realized its full potential as the dominant technology. The obvious problem with XML is that the syntax is so verbose and redundant that it's only barely human-writable, but this is 100% a solvable problem.
Is that really accurate? In a world where HTML5 never happened, how would XHTML/XSLT solve the same problems that modern front-end Javascript frameworks do (interactive data-driven websites)? I say this as someone who thinks XSLT is a really useful technology, and doesn't want it to be deprecated.
That browser world would of been glorious without HTML5. Where Javascript wasn't in the browser and Tcl was (it was a contender); we would be working with plugin based browsers rather than built-in to the hood. That in turn would enable you to process incoming documents based in XSLT.
It would of been glorious having any programming language usable within the browser. Craft your own features rather than what's given to you now. It's only now that we're gaining the ability to use other languages via WASM.
Tcl was a contender to Javascript in the browser but Javascript won because it didn't require a plugin.
And as Tcl never became the browser's default scripting environment juxtaposition Flash eventually lost because the browser platform evolved to make its proprietary plug-in unnecessary
> ...we would be working with plugin based browsers rather than built-in to the hood...
How is that different from sites using Java applets, which were pretty much universally loathed when we had them?
> ...Tcl...
How is Tcl better than Javascript?
> ...Flash...
I'm not sure I really understand what point you're making here. Are you saying that the native browser APIs evolving to make Flash obsolete is a bad thing? If I'm reading you correctly you're saying that websites being free to use their own proprietary plugins is somehow better than HTML5/Javascript?
XSLT however has an absurdly steep learning curve, on top of it (like XML) being utterly verbose. There is a reason neither technology ever caught on outside of big enterprise or government projects.
When I first learned that XSLT was going away, I got curious how to do the same thing in JS (client-side templating during page load). It turns out there's a very nice way to do it, by using inline scripts that append elements next to document.currentScript. Lean Rada wrote about it here: https://leanrada.com/notes/inline-rendering-currentscript/ and I wrote about it as well: https://vladimirslepnev.me/write
Yeah. I want to note quickly that the currentScript method can do a bit more than that. For example, the page head can include script.js with the code for rendering the site shared header and footer. Then in the page body you can have inline scripts using the currentScript trick to add the header and footer in place, kinda like including shared templates. And it runs during page load, before even onLoad, so the page renders with header and footer straight away.
The breakage that sticks out to me is that IIS in Windows Server outputs some reports as XML+XSLT and these have become nigh unusable for years now.
I ignore every official statement about “support” and simply look at the horse's mouth: Microsoft hasn’t bothered to fix this in IIS, and likely never will.
It’s a dead product, “supported” only in a contractual sense, not a practical one.
(If you called support right now demanding fix for this, they’d tell you that it’s broken by design, have you tried moving to a recurring revenue service offering?)
More nonstop assrape of enterprise applications at Google's behest — instead of stepping up to the plate as a viable, enterprise browser, Firefox is just copying its big bro again and plans to remove it.
Every decision Google makes is done with their best interests in mind, not yours. Firefox (and Microsoft!) following their footsteps is positively lame.
i just got flashbacks to a past life where i handcrafted XSLT to pre-render output from a service as HTML server side. Of course the front end was running some asp.net version and Microsoft flavored XSLT had lots of quirks.
In the age of LLMs I would expect that legacy code bet carried indefinitely. The LLMs will have it indefinitely in their training data, and with code "cheap" to produce now, what are the good reasons for dropping legacy code?
XSLT is rarely used, a significant attack surface, and the upstream libraries are riddled with vulnerabilities. LLMs make the problem worse by lowering the cost of finding new vulnerabilities.
I am still using XSLT. I have been using it for 26 years. I generate XML documents on the backend and turn them into HTML for various reports. XSLT has a lot of features and power that newer templating languages lack.
Are any of these newer templating languages worth me switching?
The cool thing with a wasm-based xslt implementation is there is no need for the browser vendors to gate keep it. Just use what you like or develop your own.
Except XSLT dates back to the late 90s. WASM was not even a glint in the eyes of its creators. Mozilla even used XSLT internally to drive the GUI for their browser iirc. I think based on that there is a good reason it was incorporated into browsers.
If they were going to implement it themselves it would be unnecessary to faff around with webassembly. They could just keep the native code implementation that they already have.
The problem is that XSLT has so few users that the browser writers don't want to waste any more time on it. Those few people who wrote their site around it will have to either rewrite it to use something else or add some third party webassembly implementation themselves.
In an XML document a "processing instruction" can trigger the XSLT processor to transform the document in another format.
So an XML document would be parsed and processed by the XML engine, trigger XSLT processor, which would then trigger again the XML processor again and the HTML processor.
So XSLT processing for XML/XHTML is deeply embedded. Dropping it removes a lot of corner cases that AI is good at exploiting.
Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time.
Yes and no, canvas was fine for replacing flash, and JS performance was good enough quickly.
Audio however was a crapshoot for years, especially for games.
Even basic WebAudio took until 2015, and the final piece to match Flash being AudioWorklet was only first available in 2018(Chrome) and took until April _2021_ land in Safari.
So before 2021 you needed to either write your own abstractions to support multiple API's with different execution models with so-so capabilties to be somewhat on-par with what Flash provided or even for years resort to simpler solutions (ie just samples).
Even for enthusiastic Android vendors who saw it as a differentiating feature from iPhone, Flash still took three years from the iPhone launch to have its first release. Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform. Waiting for them as a vendor to bump their proprietary platform vs integrating support for the features into the browser would have cost years for mobile adoption.
> Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform
I wouldn't say poor.
Adobe had its own creative-software empire to up-keep. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and its web-authoring products gave it enormous influence over creative professionals and while Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash were serious competitors in web design and interactive media Adobe needed the missing monopoly cards. Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver were them.
Flash was security ridden yes, Flash required a plugin, yes. these could of all been solved and while I dislike Adobe with a passion, to refactor the software would of been an expensive take. Jobs + HTML5, WebGL, JS had all entered the ring and finished the blow. I miss it.
Growing up with the internet in 2005, 2010's was the end of the wild world web. 2020's was the era of walled gardens for which we now have LLM's for the theme park and we're now entering 2030 where the internet is on fire, creativity is now wrung between Yes AI and No Ai.
Hopefully 2040 should bring world peace. One would hope.
Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time.
You're half right.
Yes, Jobs killed Flash. But he did it because Flash on mobile was a battery killer. And when the original iPhone came out (one of which I still have), battery technology wasn't as advanced as it is now.
Before I got my wife's hand-me-down iPhone, I had one of the few mobile phones that supported Flash. On the few occasions when I used the web browser, I lived in fear that I'd land on a web site that was using Flash because I knew it would tear through the phone's battery in less than 10 minutes.
Ever notice that the people on HN who pine for the good-ol'-days of Flash only remember games? Never the Flash ads and intrusive videos.
Nobody uses XSLT and nobody maintains XSLT. You're free to support it in your own browser but it's not reasonable to expect Mozilla to support XSLT any more than it supports VRML.
Semi-serious suggestion: wrap the files in an (X)HTML page that links to a Javascript file loading a full XML parser compiled to WebAssembly, which then does the full transformation live, in-browser. You wouldn't need to change your templates or your generation logic much if you structure the surrounding skeleton right!
Of course, you'd need to get over the lunacy of loading a full DOM transformation library into the browser DOM.
you also need to get over the fact that this doesn't work while disabling javascript, while built in xslt doesn't need javascript. on the other hand though it's not a big loss given that xslt isn't any safer. anyone who turns off javascript probably ought to have turned of xslt as well.
but that just aside. the last time this was discussed a year ago i actually tried to find a working solution to load xslt through javascript and could not find any.
i only got as far as verifying that js can be loaded from an xml mimetype. xslt implementations in js also exist. what's missing is the wrapper code to load the xslt library and run it over the xml and xslt files.
perhaps now with this seriously being needed by a few sites someone will have the time to get this working.
My thought wasn't so much "do XSLT parsing in Javascript" and more "compile a C program to apply XSLT transformations using emscriptem and embed that". You can probably throw that concept into any slop machine and get a cursed compatibility library out of it.
Good riddance. XSLT and EJB marked the dark ages of software development. For a half decade nothing made sense and programmers and management were going along with the charade until everyone collectively realized it was complete garbage and just stopped using it. I remember replacing an XSLT/EJB system that processed one order per minute with a C++ system written in a week that processed 10,000/minute. A team of a dozen programmers had been working on that XSLT disaster for years.
In retrospect I really think it was a deliberate plan by IBM and Sun to turn software development into such an awful, impenetrable quagmire that they would be the only ones who could build and maintain any system.
More than ten years ago a coworker wrote a tool to generate Swift from iOS storyboards, to pass data through segues and give us typed access to identifiers. First version of it used XSLT to transform the storyboard XML. A powerful, if niche technology.
Feels crazy to me that to date, this was the only widely supported way to pull in shared bits of HMTL like headers, navigation, and footers without anything dynamic on either end. It’s such a basic and common use case to be so poorly covered.
I encode all the text, localization, provenance, pedagogical, and forced alignment data for my Latin language audiobook chapters[0] as TEI-XML. When I fetch a document out BaseX, I have an XQM module that wraps the document in a number of XML processing instructions (PIs), one being a pointer to the reader XSLT 1.0 stylesheet which does all the HTML rendering client-side.
It's a cool system, and I'll be bummed when I have to do this on the server. I already get warnings in the Firefox console about them soon deprecating XSLT support, so it's not just Chrome.
Chrome is putting a big red button on any site using XSLT.
I'm for my RSS feed. It's ugly, I will have to move to another solution. It works fine on Firefox.
I find it baffling that anyone still cares. RSS nerds like RSS because it can be consumed by software that displays it however the user wants. XSLT pages just function as normal webpages, there is no consuming it programatically because XSLT is the view language. The underlying XML/RSS is what you wanted, not the hodgepodged together crap on top of it.
At least Firefox will still have it, although with Mozilla being the way that it is, I wouldn't be surprised if they follow suit.
I feel the same way about this that I do about removing Flash support: it's good that we're moving on to better things, but that doesn't help if there aren't better things to move on to.
What's the simple goto for making web based games that kids can mess around with? It was Flash, and now it's nothing. How do you set up an RSS feed to not just blast raw XML at the user? Soon it won't be XSLT any more, but I don't see a good replacement (even more annoying is the fact that browsers used to have features to handle RSS feeds by themselves, and XSLT was used to sidestep that problem, but now there's no more side to step).
>What's the simple goto for making web based games that kids can mess around with?
Web games? Is that like Roblox on your school chromebook?
I think Roblox is the game design space for kids these days (though I would recommend parents to protect their kids from that game until they actually stop the paedophiles).
If you do want to target the browser, the sky is the limit. WASM has made any desktop game design platform compatible with browsers. Thanks to Ruffle, you can build flash games and they will even work on your iPhone, despite Steve Jobs' personal vendetta against Adobe's CEO.
RSS can have CSS stylesheets if you intentionally break the content type, so you can try your hand at making RSS feeds pretty. However, realistically, the kids aren't using RSS anymore. Browsers don't really support them, clients are run by stubborn people like me refusing to give up on what could have been, and RSS sources are dying out one by one.
I've been making Easel (https://easel.games) for four years so far! A place for teenagers to make multiplayer web games and share them with each other. Still a long way to go but this is the goal!
Why does it have to be web-based? Discoverability? There's Minecraft and Lego. I discovered the CLI of MSDOS when I was a kid. It was a world to explore for sure.
There used to be pictionary online, web-based, which used Shockwave. iSketch I think it was called. There's probably alternatives these days, but I wouldn't know them. And regarding the Roblox issue: yes, some **heads were drawing ** pictures. Screw those people. This is what you get when you interact with total strangers. It brings the worst in people. How to solve that? Play with strangers-lite. Play games with people who are local to you. Yes, issues may ensue, but at the very least you can contact each other as parents.
116 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 8.2 ms ] thread> For functionality and compatibility reasons, Microsoft Edge adopts nearly all of the Chromium project's changes to the web platform. However, Microsoft retains full control of the Microsoft Edge browser and may defer or reject changes. The Microsoft Edge team decides if the change benefits browser users.
All downstream Chrome clones will follow papa Google eventually, as they won't keep stuff working on their own, cherry picking upstream.
Everyone likes to have their private branch, until they discover how many hours they need to keep up with upstream, especially if upstream doesn't care one iota about them.
I've been doing it for 5 years as one dude, it just got a lot easier with LLMs recently though.
I lost any enthusiasm for XML after my experience with WDDX and XML-RPC, but as a foundation for HTML it was the best thing going. And maybe still is, given the absence of cross-toolchain contenders? Ditto for XSLT, at least if disregarding the choice to make the syntax homoiconic. In fact I circled back to XSLT long after it was clear it was a dead end. A good tool is a good tool, and the fact it remains so despite the wanton neglect only proves it.
https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-starttags
If you make a mistake and use incorrect syntax in html, the browser will do its best to recover. In xhtml, it would just completely fail. Which approach is better is debatable.
Yeah and then we could have called it xhtml5. Too bad that does not exist. Oh wait https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/xhtml.html
> But the anti-XML sentiment was explicit and spiteful.
No, xhtml was just a bad idea creating tons of problems and solving none.
It might actually work if reintroduced these days as long as we can consider many components to be valid documents.
Sure there is some embedded JS in there as well but ignore that and JSX is thr XHTML comeback story.
I suppose the important part was that jsx needed to be compiled, which means it couldn't introduce any new security issues…
Client-side XSLT was always pretty useless, but I dont see what HTML5 has to do with it?
The only real use case for client-side XSLT was for styling/layout back before CSS became widely supported. Improvements in CSS support made XSLT unnecessary.
Alas, for laughably bad reasons we had to scrap all that for HTML5, Javascript and CSS; a stack so awful that most devs doing anything on the frontend immediately scramble to React, TypeScript, Tailwind, whatever it takes to avoid the underlying garbage.
A horrid state of affairs that will only get worse as time goes on.
The XHTML/XML/XSLT tooling was bad, and XSLT was hard to reason about. That meant that amateurs had no way to learn it, and those amateurs went to school and became the workforce.
The web became a winner because it was easy to get something working. And then Google made it a mission to make great developer tools in everyone's hands for free.
I think in 2026 we could build the tooling around a better experience, but it would require thinking about the developer experience first.
But, as a stack, the XML/XSL/XPath/etc combination was weak because XSLT was hard to comprehend and never updated. No browser supports XSLT 2 or 3; they froze support with 1. XSLT 2 was 2007, a year before HTML 5 was a thing, yet it never got picked up by browsers. Javascript was just easier to understand than XSLT. Development of XHTML was also glacial, and people wanted new tags, especially for video.
Turns out that tasks easily done by programming languages are best done by programming languages. Who knew?
JSON allowing frontends and backends to communicate in a way analogous to the "smart endpoints, dumb pipes" model for networking saved the Web. The XML adherents wanted the inverted model, which was always insanely difficult to reason about and led to entirely XML-specific security threats.
It would of been glorious having any programming language usable within the browser. Craft your own features rather than what's given to you now. It's only now that we're gaining the ability to use other languages via WASM.
Tcl was a contender to Javascript in the browser but Javascript won because it didn't require a plugin.
And as Tcl never became the browser's default scripting environment juxtaposition Flash eventually lost because the browser platform evolved to make its proprietary plug-in unnecessary
How is that different from sites using Java applets, which were pretty much universally loathed when we had them?
> ...Tcl...
How is Tcl better than Javascript?
> ...Flash...
I'm not sure I really understand what point you're making here. Are you saying that the native browser APIs evolving to make Flash obsolete is a bad thing? If I'm reading you correctly you're saying that websites being free to use their own proprietary plugins is somehow better than HTML5/Javascript?
Tcl is an ace language and well suited for the web, just the old stigma of programming held everything up. And that Oracle.
If the plugins were open, in that would of opened the browser rather than closing it as current to the internet world where it's dominated by Google.
Firefox the only major alternative and only because of Google.
If plugins were the browser get-go then any shift of plugins could rock the boat of monopoly.
> Are you saying that the native browser APIs evolving to make Flash obsolete is a bad thing?
Pretty much yes.
I ignore every official statement about “support” and simply look at the horse's mouth: Microsoft hasn’t bothered to fix this in IIS, and likely never will.
It’s a dead product, “supported” only in a contractual sense, not a practical one.
(If you called support right now demanding fix for this, they’d tell you that it’s broken by design, have you tried moving to a recurring revenue service offering?)
Every decision Google makes is done with their best interests in mind, not yours. Firefox (and Microsoft!) following their footsteps is positively lame.
This is a harbinger of some rough seas ahead.
Reducing attack surface.
LLMs make the problem easier because lowering the cost of fixing the vulnerabilities
Are any of these newer templating languages worth me switching?
The problem is that XSLT has so few users that the browser writers don't want to waste any more time on it. Those few people who wrote their site around it will have to either rewrite it to use something else or add some third party webassembly implementation themselves.
So an XML document would be parsed and processed by the XML engine, trigger XSLT processor, which would then trigger again the XML processor again and the HTML processor.
So XSLT processing for XML/XHTML is deeply embedded. Dropping it removes a lot of corner cases that AI is good at exploiting.
Step 1: Gain browser monopoly
Step 2: Generate fake security scare
Step 3: Gaslight everyone that only way to mitigate is to get rid of it completely like Flash.
Audio however was a crapshoot for years, especially for games.
Even basic WebAudio took until 2015, and the final piece to match Flash being AudioWorklet was only first available in 2018(Chrome) and took until April _2021_ land in Safari.
So before 2021 you needed to either write your own abstractions to support multiple API's with different execution models with so-so capabilties to be somewhat on-par with what Flash provided or even for years resort to simpler solutions (ie just samples).
I wouldn't say poor.
Adobe had its own creative-software empire to up-keep. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and its web-authoring products gave it enormous influence over creative professionals and while Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash were serious competitors in web design and interactive media Adobe needed the missing monopoly cards. Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver were them.
Flash was security ridden yes, Flash required a plugin, yes. these could of all been solved and while I dislike Adobe with a passion, to refactor the software would of been an expensive take. Jobs + HTML5, WebGL, JS had all entered the ring and finished the blow. I miss it.
Growing up with the internet in 2005, 2010's was the end of the wild world web. 2020's was the era of walled gardens for which we now have LLM's for the theme park and we're now entering 2030 where the internet is on fire, creativity is now wrung between Yes AI and No Ai.
Hopefully 2040 should bring world peace. One would hope.
The only good thing about flash were the authoring tool but it only appealed to content (games, websites) producers, never the users.
Is that good accessibility ?
You're half right.
Yes, Jobs killed Flash. But he did it because Flash on mobile was a battery killer. And when the original iPhone came out (one of which I still have), battery technology wasn't as advanced as it is now.
Before I got my wife's hand-me-down iPhone, I had one of the few mobile phones that supported Flash. On the few occasions when I used the web browser, I lived in fear that I'd land on a web site that was using Flash because I knew it would tear through the phone's battery in less than 10 minutes.
Ever notice that the people on HN who pine for the good-ol'-days of Flash only remember games? Never the Flash ads and intrusive videos.
Jobs did the future a favor.
Of course, you'd need to get over the lunacy of loading a full DOM transformation library into the browser DOM.
but that just aside. the last time this was discussed a year ago i actually tried to find a working solution to load xslt through javascript and could not find any.
i only got as far as verifying that js can be loaded from an xml mimetype. xslt implementations in js also exist. what's missing is the wrapper code to load the xslt library and run it over the xml and xslt files.
perhaps now with this seriously being needed by a few sites someone will have the time to get this working.
Framesets. Not great UI though.
It's a cool system, and I'll be bummed when I have to do this on the server. I already get warnings in the Firefox console about them soon deprecating XSLT support, so it's not just Chrome.
[0]: https://fabulae.orbilii.com
Removing XSLT for a more secure browser(https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-x...) 183 points|justin-reeves|1 year ago|337 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45823059
Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT(https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/CxL4g...) 87 points|CharlesW|1 year ago|149 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779261
A look at XSLT 3.0 (2017)(https://www.xml.com/articles/2017/02/14/why-you-should-be-us...) 75 points|protomolecool|1 year ago|45 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026013
Show HN: I Built a XSLT Blog Framework(https://vgr.land/content/posts/20250821.xml) 116 points|vgr-land|1 year ago|68 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098
Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes(https://github.com/Evidlo/xsl-website) 211 points|Evidlo|1 year ago|114 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988271
Should the web platform adopt XSLT 3.0?(https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578) 133 points|protomolecool|1 year ago|108 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987552
XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites(https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11582) 160 points|colejohnson66|1 year ago|146 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987346
Google did not unilaterally decide to kill XSLT(https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/22/no-google-did-...) 103 points|bkardell|1 year ago|128 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987239
"Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"(https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11563) 388 points|troupo|1 year ago|535 comments _ache_ ↗ Anyone getting 403 Forbidden? icantevenhold ↗ Yea me too, not sure if hug of death or geo block _ache_ ↗ Chrome is putting a big red button on any site using XSLT.
I'm for my RSS feed. It's ugly, I will have to move to another solution. It works fine on Firefox. pamcake ↗ > It works fine on Firefox. [dead] ArgumentMoney81 ↗ [flagged] creatonez ↗ I find it baffling that anyone still cares. RSS nerds like RSS because it can be consumed by software that displays it however the user wants. XSLT pages just function as normal webpages, there is no consuming it programatically because XSLT is the view language. The underlying XML/RSS is what you wanted, not the hodgepodged together crap on top of it. Telaneo ↗ At least Firefox will still have it, although with Mozilla being the way that it is, I wouldn't be surprised if they follow suit. jeroenhd ↗ >What's the simple goto for making web based games that kids can mess around with? BSTRhino ↗ I've been making Easel (https://easel.games) for four years so far! A place for teenagers to make multiplayer web games and share them with each other. Still a long way to go but this is the goal! dfabulich ↗ Mozilla has announced that they intend to unship XSLT. https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/ZRy... cowlevel ↗ Realistically, right now, it's Roblox. choo-t ↗ > What's the simple goto for making web based games that kids can mess around with? It was Flash, and now it's nothing. Fnoord ↗ Why does it have to be web-based? Discoverability? There's Minecraft and Lego. I discovered the CLI of MSDOS when I was a kid. It was a world to explore for sure.
I can't load this page.
Ex: https://ache.one/en/rss.xml
For now... This warning is logged in browser console and devtools for your page:
> XSLT will be removed from this web browser soon. See https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1287
I feel the same way about this that I do about removing Flash support: it's good that we're moving on to better things, but that doesn't help if there aren't better things to move on to.
What's the simple goto for making web based games that kids can mess around with? It was Flash, and now it's nothing. How do you set up an RSS feed to not just blast raw XML at the user? Soon it won't be XSLT any more, but I don't see a good replacement (even more annoying is the fact that browsers used to have features to handle RSS feeds by themselves, and XSLT was used to sidestep that problem, but now there's no more side to step).
Web games? Is that like Roblox on your school chromebook?
I think Roblox is the game design space for kids these days (though I would recommend parents to protect their kids from that game until they actually stop the paedophiles).
If you do want to target the browser, the sky is the limit. WASM has made any desktop game design platform compatible with browsers. Thanks to Ruffle, you can build flash games and they will even work on your iPhone, despite Steve Jobs' personal vendetta against Adobe's CEO.
RSS can have CSS stylesheets if you intentionally break the content type, so you can try your hand at making RSS feeds pretty. However, realistically, the kids aren't using RSS anymore. Browsers don't really support them, clients are run by stubborn people like me refusing to give up on what could have been, and RSS sources are dying out one by one.
Which is also a pedophile safe-haven (as proven by Chris Hansen and associates) so I wouldn't let my kids use it.
Pico-8, Picotron, Tic-80, GameMaker, Godot all have simple web exporter.
There used to be pictionary online, web-based, which used Shockwave. iSketch I think it was called. There's probably alternatives these days, but I wouldn't know them. And regarding the Roblox issue: yes, some **heads were drawing ** pictures. Screw those people. This is what you get when you interact with total strangers. It brings the worst in people. How to solve that? Play with strangers-lite. Play games with people who are local to you. Yes, issues may ensue, but at the very least you can contact each other as parents.