Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT

Posted by CharlesW 11/1/2025

Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT(groups.google.com)

87 points | 149 commentspage 3

thro1 11/1/2025|

Wasn't the social contract that get the market share that you can use Chrome to browse all the web already existing as well as by using the other browsers - means not discriminating (non-profit, government, older sites or those working well without JS for ads to be tracked), and not to kill parts of that web when convenient ?

righthand 11/1/2025||

They're keeping XPath but removing XSLT. What a joke. All these brilliant Google engineers and all this brilliant AI tooling and no one can fix XSLT.

Google pays people to destroy the open web, not improve it. These Google engineers are pathetic and should be ashamed of their inept laziness.

Animats 11/1/2025||

It would be kind of nice if HTML had something where you can make a remote fetch request for JSON or XML data and get it formatted in some CSS-defined way, without Javascript.

apimade 11/1/2025||

Why not just expose an HTML representation of the data? Why must it remain JSON, XML, CSV, Parquet, fixed length or tab delimited files, ProtoBuf, etc?

API’s should provide content in the format asked of them. CSS should be used to style that content.

This is largely solved in RFC-6838 which is about “how media types, representation and the interoperability problem is solved”. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6838/

Already supported by .NET Web APIs, Django, Spring, Node, Laravel, RoR, etc.

Less mature ecosystems like Golang have solutions, they’re just very much patch-work/RYO.

Or even use OpenResty or njs in Nginx, which puts the transformation in the web service layer and not the web application layer. So your data might be JSON blob, it’ll convert to HTML in real-time. Something similar can be achieved elsewhere like Apache using mod_lua etc.

I think bastardising one format (HTML), to support another format (JSON), is probably not the right move. We’ve already done that with stuff like media queries which have been abused for fingerprinting, or “has” CSS selectors for shitty layout hacks by devs who refuse to fix the underlying structure.

_heimdall 11/1/2025|||

Rather than adding an HTML endpoint in addition to the XML or JSON, expose the data and link it to stylesheets that dynamically render the HTML client side.

That's the whole point of XSLT, ship the data and tell the browser how to transform it to HTML.

1718627440 11/1/2025|||

Because so you can separate the data from the layout. You can e.g. return a list of strings and then the strings become the summaries of a set of details elements.

apimade 11/1/2025||

The description you give inherently changes the structure of the data, and JavaScript would be the best way to post-process it. CSS is about styling the structure of HTML, not structural changes to it.

Unless you have a good example, I think you’re coming at this from an “everything’s a nail if the only tool I have is a hammer”.

1718627440 11/1/2025||

CSS if for styling of semantic structure of HTML, XSLT is a language to convert normalized data to semantic structure. That's what I gave an explanation about, I wasn't talking about CSS.

bawolff 11/1/2025||

They are only getting rid of xslt. You can still use <?xml-stylesheet with CSS

rhdunn 11/1/2025||

CSS based views of XML are somewhat useful, but are limited in what they can do. Especially things like setting the HTML title, generating a table of contents, or transforming data like dates and times.

bawolff 11/1/2025||

Sure, but the parent literally was asking for xml styled with css.

cess11 11/1/2025||

In practice this means XSLT execution will be moved from clients to servers and I'm not so sure this is positive with regards to security.

thro1 11/1/2025||

How about that:

Google's unilaterally tries to kill part of the web that not let them track or profit from ads so easy ?

.. and with all that money they get (and brains), still to lazy to fix few old bugs (stuck at old version).

thro1 11/3/2025|

(?) - then more about the tactic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44994459 (web looks like nails for that tool we have)

now how about that:

Chrome voluntarily decides to disjoint self from parts of the web where it can't take profits - saying they are not in fashion ..

- and if then, actually no one would like to have to follow ever again anything like that ?. (ocean is _big_ and.. blue)

wosined 11/1/2025||

Just leave it alone bro.

bugbuddy 11/1/2025|

Good riddance. The web needs to shed all the old baggages like this to move forward. Looking forward to MCP becoming part of the browser.

imiric 11/1/2025|

Wow, I couldn't disagree more.

XSLT is no more "baggage" than HTML itself. Removing it in no way "moves the web forward". And integrating technologies part of the current hype cycle, which very well may disappear in a year, is a terrible idea.