Direction of travel seems to be JavaScript for all of this sort of thing

Posted Aug 27, 2025 22:42 UTC (Wed) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Direction of travel seems to be JavaScript for all of this sort of thing by farnz
Parent article: The tangled web of XSLT browser support

I suspect most people would be happy with a PDF.js-like solution.[1] The point of contention is whether it would be integrated into the browser, like PDF.js is with Mozilla, or whether you have to explicitly bootstrap it by emitting a snippet of HTML and JS to get the ball rolling. The whole debate regarding RSS is about the importance to the open ecosystem of being able to share a single URL, and to do so without requiring any specialized server-side application logic and client detection.

Imagine if browsers couldn't display PDFs, either natively or by reliably being able to pass it off to a local viewer. PDF as a open document format would lose much of its value, and walled gardens would flourish even more. This dynamic is precisely why YouTube makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to directly pull a video. Making the content tightly bound to their viewing platform is integral to how they achieved and maintain their dominance. It would appear (at least based on the claims) that RSS, like SMTP, achieved escape velocity before the dominance of walled garden platforms squashed the ecosystem, but that dynamic largely rests on built-in XSLT support.

Direction of travel seems to be JavaScript for all of this sort of thing

Posted Aug 28, 2025 8:32 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

PDF.js was prototyped outside the browser, and integrated when it was clear that it was useful (to replace PDF plugins, admittedly).

I don't see any strong reason why the same couldn't happen with XSLT; people show cool tech demos outside the browser, using a JavaScript based viewer for their XML format (which is something that most of the usage of XSLT I've seen, bar the trick of making an RSS feed pretty, could do easily - they're currently serving an XML data file and XSLT file to generate a web page, they could serve a HTML5+JavaScript+CSS fileset and an XML data file).

The RSS use would need a bit more server-side assistance to serve the web page to browsers, and the RSS feed to RSS readers, but would at least be something you could prove works well, before asking browsers to integrate xslt.js.