There's a lot of history behind WhatWG that revolves around XML.
WhatWG is focused on maintaining specs that browsers intend to implement and maintain. When Chrome, Firefox, and Safari agree to remove XSLT that effectively decides for WhatWG's removal of the spec.
I wouldn't put too much weight behind who originally proposed the removal. It's a pretty small world when it comes to web specifications, the discussions likely started between vendors before one decided to propose it.
The issue is you can’t say to put little weight who originally proposed the removal if the other poster is putting all the weight on Google, who didn’t even initially propose it
I wouldn't put weight on the initial proposer either way. As best I've been able to keep up with the topic, google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal. I thought they were also the first to announce their decision, though maybe my timing is off there.
By browser vendors, you mean? Yes it seems like they were in agreement and many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation.
Users and web developers seemed much less on board though[1][2], enough that Google referenced that in their announcement.
Yes, that's what I mean. In this comment tree, you've said:
> google has been the party leading the charge arguing for the removal.
and
> many here seem to think that was largely driven by google though that's speculation
I'm saying that I don't see any evidence that this was "driven by google". All the evidence I see is that Google, Mozilla, and Apple were all pretty immediately in agreement that removing XSLT was the move they all wanted to make.
You're telling us that we shouldn't think too hard about the fact that a Mozilla staffer opened the request for removal, and that we should notice that Google "led the charge". It would be interesting if somebody could back that up with something besides vibes, because I don't even see how there was a charge to lead. Among the groups that agreed, that agreement appears to have been quick and unanimous.
In the github issues I have followed, including those linked above, I primarily saw Google engineers arguing for removing XSLT from the spec. I'm not saying they are the sole architects of the spec removal, and I'm not claiming to have seen all related discussions.
I am sharing my view, though, that Google engineers have been the majority share of browser engineer comments I've seen arguing for removing XSLT.
Probably if Mozilla didn't push for it initially XSLT would stay around for another decade or longer.
Their board syphons the little money that is left out of their "foundation + corporation" combo, and they keep cutting people from Firefox dev team every year. Of course they don't want to maintain pieces of web standards if it means extra million for their board members.
I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google.
Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat.
If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.
> If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust[…] Those people have since been let go.
The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses.
Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with.
(There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.)
So the idea is that some group has been perpetuating a decade or so's worth of ongoing conspiracy to ensure that Mozilla continues to exist but makes decisions that "keep Mozilla itself impotent"?
That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done".
I guess you mean except Mozilla and Safari...which are the two other competing browser engines? It's not like a it's a room full of Chromium based browsers.
Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete.
Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three.
I really can’t imagine Safari is going anywhere. Meanwhile the Mozilla Foundation has been very poorly steering the ship for several years and has rightfully earned the reputation it has garnered as a result. There’s a reason there are so many superior forks. They waste their time on the strangest pet projects.
Honestly the one thing I don’t begrudge them is taking Google’s money to make them the default search engine. That’s a very easy deal with the devil to make especially because it’s so trivial to change your default search engine which I imagine a large percentage of Firefox users do with glee. But what they have focused on over the last couple of years has been very strange to watch.
I know Proton gets mixed feelings around here, but to me it’s always seemed like Proton and Mozilla should be more coordinated. Feel like they could do a lot of interesting things together
Not sure how you got from that to “Google is ignoring standards”.