XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites
What is the issue with the HTML Standard?
One of the issues we’ve seen in #11523 and #11563 is that the proposal to remove XSLT from the spec doesn’t acknowledge existing use cases beyond Chrome Status counter stats.
According to Chrome’s own Blink principles of web compatibility:
The primary signal we use is the fraction of page views impacted in Chrome, usually computed via Blink’s UseCounter UMA metrics. As a general rule of thumb, 0.1% of PageVisits (1 in 1000) is large, while 0.001% is considered small but non-trivial. Anything below about 0.00001% (1 in 10 million) is generally considered trivial. There are around 771 billion web pages viewed in Chrome every month (not counting other Chromium-based browsers). So seriously breaking even 0.0001% still results in someone being frustrated every 3 seconds, and so not to be taken lightly!
To add to the use cases already provided in the discussions above, here’s a small list:
| Name | Description | Link |
|---|---|---|
| United States Congress | Legislative texts are shown using XSLT | https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/hr3617/BILLS-117hr3617ih.xml and https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119hr400ih/xml/BILLS-119hr400ih.xml |
| National Weather Service Current Observations | Uses client-side XSLT to transform and display current weather observation data from XML. | https://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KABE.xml |
| European Parliament Political Parties | Uses client-side XSLT to transform and display information on European political parties from XML. | https://www.europarl.europa.eu/politicalparties/index_en.xml |
| Therapeutic Goods Administration Code Definitions | Uses client-side XSLT to transform and display regulatory code definitions from XML. | https://apps.tga.gov.au/downloads/sequence-description.xml |
| Canadian Forest Service Weather Stations Metadata | Uses client-side XSLT to transform and display weather station metadata from XML. | https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/downloads/fwi_obs/WeatherStations_CWFIS_export.xml |
| European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register Method Types | Uses client-side XSLT to transform and display method type codes from XML. | https://converters.eionet.europa.eu/xmlfile/EPRTR_MethodTypeCode_1.xml |
If I, and others, could easily find such examples, I believe browser vendors could easily find these, too.
I would like @mfreed7 @domenic and other Googlers who initiated and move on with this proposal to acknowledge this, and provide more rationale for removing XSLT than just Chrome Status counter stats.
