Posted by croes 2 hours ago
> 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.
Removed features don't always follow the same timelines either (and not just because of a lag in syncing to upstream Chromium).
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.