chrome developers: we are thinking of dropping support for rendering RSS feeds as something other than garbage code. does anyone have any reasons not to do this?

developers from many different backgrounds: yes, I rely on normal people being able to understand RSS for my business. dropping support will be disastrous for me because I can't rely on people to have some random extension installed.

chrome devs: OK well we're probably going to do it anyway because we can't be bothered to support web standards. uwu google is only a teensy wee company uwu

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523

#xslt #standards#openWeb

Recently I got sufficiently annoyed at authoring posts in two places so that they were visible both here and on HaugenHus: Now – this is also in part because I prefer to write in Markdown which GoToSocial handles marvellously – that I decided to start looking at options. Of course there are many, but I chose to pursue an exclusively client-side solution with a static pageset to lighten the load on my little Raspberry Pi.

I landed on a solution built on HTMX + GoToSocial:RSS + XSLT which can be seen on HaugenHus: XSLT Test, but was horrified to find that after 26 years Firefox hasn’t managed to solve for HTML within an XML node. Of course it’s easy to get frustrated with a second-rate browser like Firefox 😁 – WebKit all the way baby! – but why bother when someone else has keep the flame war burning for 24 years Bug 98168 🤣. Of course with every ugly battle there are some heroes, and Scott Trenda was clearly one of these both offering a viable workaround and serving as a calm voice of reason.

So with a viable workaround to my XSLT woes, why haven’t I finished this little project? Well, there are two reasons: the first is that a workaround should never be allowed to become a permanent solution; and secondly, my WebKit enthusiasm may have been misplaced. It turns out that the fine folks over at Apple – @annevk – have expressed interest in killing my XSLT dreams 🥺.

With all of that said, what I found most interesting about this whole thing is that while I have been aware of XSLT for years, I unknowingly decided to play with it just as a storm appears to be brewing. Eventually I will get over my desire to minimize my dependence on JavaScript, but until then I’m sure there many other ways to solve this problem. I might just need to change the constraints.

(Maybe @gotosocial@superseriousbusiness.org would give us JSON Feed . . . feature request incoming after a bit more research 🤓.)

Additional Reading

XSLT Debate Leads to Bigger Questions of Web Governance

#Now #XSLT #Firefox #WebKit #GoToSocial #HTMX #RSS #JSONFeed

Recently I got sufficiently annoyed at authoring posts in two places so that they were visible both here and on HaugenHus: Now – this is also in part because I prefer to write in Markdown which GoToSocial handles marvellously – that I decided to start looking at options. Of course there are many, but I chose to pursue an exclusively client-side solution with a static pageset to lighten the load on my little Raspberry Pi.

I landed on a solution built on HTMX + GoToSocial:RSS + XSLT which can be seen on HaugenHus: XSLT Test, but was horrified to find that after 26 years Firefox hasn’t managed to solve for HTML within an XML node. Of course it’s easy to get frustrated with a second-rate browser like Firefox 😁 – WebKit all the way baby! – but why bother when someone else has keep the flame war burning for 24 years Bug 98168 🤣. Of course with every ugly battle there are some heroes, and Scott Trenda was clearly one of these both offering a viable workaround and serving as a calm voice of reason.

So with a viable workaround to my XSLT woes, why haven’t I finished this little project? Well, there are two reasons: the first is that a workaround should never be allowed to become a permanent solution; and secondly, my WebKit enthusiasm may have been misplaced. It turns out that the fine folks over at Apple – @annevk – have expressed interest in killing my XSLT dreams 🥺.

With all of that said, what I found most interesting about this whole thing is that while I have been aware of XSLT for years, I unknowingly decided to play with it just as a storm appears to be brewing. Eventually I will get over my desire to minimize my dependence on JavaScript, but until then I’m sure there many other ways to solve this problem. I might just need to change the constraints.

(Maybe @gotosocial@superseriousbusiness.org would give us JSON Feed . . . feature request incoming after a bit more research 🤓.)

Additional Reading

XSLT Debate Leads to Bigger Questions of Web Governance

#Now #XSLT #Firefox #WebKit #GoToSocial #HTMX #RSS #JSONFeed

When you start stealing ideas, it's hard to stop, so I wrote a post about how I styled my RSS feed with #XSLT.
Also, a couple of words on how I added XSLT support to #BSSG (it was extremely easy).
https://iyer.ru/2025/08/20/i-styled-my-rss-feed-with-xslt/

When you start stealing ideas, it's hard to stop, so I wrote a post about how I styled my RSS feed with #XSLT.
Also, a couple of words on how I added XSLT support to #BSSG (it was extremely easy).
https://iyer.ru/2025/08/20/i-styled-my-rss-feed-with-xslt/

My second tech job was generating html files from xml using xslt. That was the job.

My team of 5 or 6 shared this exact book, which is now literally coming apart at the seams due to usage, notes poking out and highlights everywhere.

25 years later (omfg!) I now look like the author.

And that code is still in use…

#xslt

chrome developers: we are thinking of dropping support for rendering RSS feeds as something other than garbage code. does anyone have any reasons not to do this?

developers from many different backgrounds: yes, I rely on normal people being able to understand RSS for my business. dropping support will be disastrous for me because I can't rely on people to have some random extension installed.

chrome devs: OK well we're probably going to do it anyway because we can't be bothered to support web standards. uwu google is only a teensy wee company uwu

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523

#xslt #standards#openWeb

My small act of #resistance against the #enshittification of the web today has been to use client-side #XSLT for something different that #RSS styling: generating multiple #SVG plots from the same #XML data:

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-xslt/

#webdev#openWeb#indieWeb

My small act of #resistance against the #enshittification of the web today has been to use client-side #XSLT for something different that #RSS styling: generating multiple #SVG plots from the same #XML data:

https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/plotting-xslt/

#webdev#openWeb#indieWeb

This comment

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-3160242434

is the most powerful writeup I've read in a long while about why #XSLT is worth it, and why instead of actively sabotaging it browsers should keep their implementations up with the progress of the standard.

If I had a more conspiracist mind, I'd say that the timing of #Google's proposal to remove #XSLT support from #Chrome#Chromium#Blink just as we are seeing a resurgence of interest in #RSS and the #indieWeb away from the centralized #GAFAM silos is quite suspicious.

(Fun fact: had #ActivityPub been designed around an #XML representation of linked data instead of #JSON, most of the #Fediverse could be presented on the web via #XSLT, without requiring #JavaScript, directly from the source objects.)