XSLT is still important

There's a major discussion going on around the XSLT standard and if browsers should continue to support it. I feel strongly that we should continue to support the standard.

XSLT stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation. Its current, and most common use, is turning RSS feeds for text or podcasts into something human-readable by applying additional elements, designs, and transformations. Chances are you've seen it subscribing to some podcasts.

There's a lot you can do with XSLT, and not just with podcast feeds.

The question of if we should get rid of XSLT starts with the presumption that its methodology has been replaced by flows like sites build with JS and React.

I do not believe we should reshape the platform to bend towards exclusive use of those flows to manage rendering content on the web. I don't like React. I don't think it is good and I don't think the type of thinking it encourages among developers is productive. I go into some more reasonable technical reasons why we shouldn't get rid of XSLT on the thread, but in a broad, philosophical sense I also believe that we should not cede the web platform to React and its imitators.

React may be open source, but it isn't the product of open source thinking. It is a fully corporate product produced to solve the problems of big corporations. Any team that isn't 20+ people deploying code to the same repo has been injured by React, has had their development curtailed, their productivity slowed, and their capacity to imagine better websites harmed by React.

XSLT has potential, and more potential than ever! Every day I see more people doing interesting things with RSS. The open web is built on XML as much as HTML and JS and we should continue to support that.

Eliminating XSLT means, on a philosophical level, a step towards a more closed and corporate web. I am opposed to that.