Chrome and Edge are removing XSLT: what breaks and what does not

troupo

There's a long discussion about XSLT removal here: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578#issuecomment-595... (the link is to the comment with this proposal https://github.com/doriantaylor/swet which already is much better than any templating proposal "the platform" is trying to push)

g-b-r

https://web.archive.org/web/20261017201132/https://doctor-se... while it gives 503

pjmlp

Edge is Chrome.

Trustable8

Shame back in the XHTML days XSLT was a spec that could have made website modularity so much cleaner. I once created an early website creation tool that merged separate components using XSLT it was really powerful in the days before javascript was usable without jQuery. However XHTML was dropped in favor of HTML5 and XSLT was pretty much useless after that. Its done well to survive this long I presume it was mainly kept to style XML files.

Devasta

It is wild to look back at XHTML and see that the W3C were entirely correct about XML. They envisaged a world of schemas, client side templating, custom elements, dynamic forms, the works. 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.

cousin_it

When I first learned that XSLT was going away, I got curious how to achieve the same thing in JS (client-side templating that happens during page load, without any "flash of content"). It turns out there's a very nice way to do it, by using inline scripts that append elements next to document.currentScript. Lean Rada wrote about it here: https://leanrada.com/notes/inline-rendering-currentscript/ and I wrote about it as well: https://vladimirslepnev.me/write

krylonmae

Looks like the site broke

jiggawatts

The breakage that sticks out to me is that IIS in Windows Server outputs some reports as XML+XSLT and these have become nigh unusable for years now. I ignore every official statement about “support” and simply look at the horse's mouth: Microsoft hasn’t bothered to fix this in IIS, and likely never will . It’s a dead product, “supported” only in a contractual sense, not a practical one. (If you called support right now demanding fix for this, they’d tell you that it’s broken by design, have you tried moving to a recurring revenue service offering?)

yokoprime

i just got flashbacks to a past life where i handcrafted XSLT to pre-render output from a service as HTML server side. Of course the front end was running some asp.net version and Microsoft flavored XSLT had lots of quirks.

compiler-devel

In the age of LLMs I would expect that legacy code bet carried indefinitely. The LLMs will have it indefinitely in their training data, and with code "cheap" to produce now, what are the good reasons for dropping legacy code?

Velocifyer

What will we do for RSS/Atom feeds?

mcculley

I am still using XSLT. I have been using it for 26 years. I generate XML documents on the backend and turn them into HTML for various reports. XSLT has a lot of features and power that newer templating languages lack. Are any of these newer templating languages worth me switching?

hmokiguess

XSLT is glorious, too bad.

goodridance

Good riddance. XSLT and EJB marked the dark ages of software development. For a half decade nothing made sense and programmers and management were going along with the charade until everyone collectively realized it was complete garbage and just stopped using it. I remember replacing an XSLT/EJB system that processed one order per minute with a C++ system written in a week that processed 10,000/minute. A team of a dozen programmers had been working on that XSLT disaster for years.

jshier

More than ten years ago a coworker wrote a tool to generate Swift from iOS storyboards, to pass data through segues and give us typed access to identifiers. First version of it used XSLT to transform the storyboard XML. A powerful, if niche technology.

cosmic_cheese

Feels crazy to me that to date, this was the only widely supported way to pull in shared bits of HTML like headers, navigation, and footers without anything dynamic on either end. It’s such a basic and common use case to be so poorly covered.

spudlyo

I encode all the text, localization, provenance, pedagogical, and forced alignment data for my Latin language audiobook chapters[0] as TEI-XML. When I fetch a document out BaseX, I have an XQM module that wraps the document in a number of XML processing instructions (PIs), one being a pointer to the reader XSLT 1.0 stylesheet which does all the HTML rendering client-side. It's a cool system, and I'll be bummed when I have to do this on the server. I already get warnings in the Firefox console about them soon deprecating XSLT support, so it's not just Chrome. [0]: https://fabulae.orbilii.com

em-bee

XSLT RIP( https://xslt.rip/ ) 698 points|edent|11 months ago|464 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45873434 Removing XSLT for a more secure browser( https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/deprecating-x... ) 183 points|justin-reeves|1 year ago|337 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45823059 Intent to Deprecate and Remove XSLT( https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/CxL4g... ) 87 points|CharlesW|1 year ago|149 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45779261 A look at XSLT 3.0 (2017)( https://www.xml.com/articles/2017/02/14/why-you-should-be-us... ) 75 points|protomolecool|1 year ago|45 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026013 Show HN: I Built a XSLT Blog Framework( https://vgr.land/content/posts/20250821.xml ) 116 points|vgr-land|1 year ago|68 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45006098 Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes( https://github.com/Evidlo/xsl-website ) 211 points|Evidlo|1 year ago|114 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44988271 Should the web platform adopt XSLT 3.0?( https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11578 ) 133 points|protomolecool|1 year ago|108 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987552 XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites( https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11582 ) 160 points|colejohnson66|1 year ago|146 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987346 Google did not unilaterally decide to kill XSLT( https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/22/no-google-did-... ) 103 points|bkardell|1 year ago|128 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987239 "Remove mentions of XSLT from the html spec"( https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/11563 ) 388 points|troupo|1 year ago|535 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952185 Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?( https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523 ) 73 points|edent|1 year ago|96 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44909599 XSLT: A Precision Tool for the Future of Structured Transformation( https://www.xml.com/articles/2025/07/19/xslt-precision-tool-... ) 58 points|protomolecool|1 year ago|59 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44633384 XSLT – Native, zero-config build system for the Web( https://github.com/pacocoursey/xslt ) 392 points|_kush|1 year ago|325 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44393817 Intent to Unship: XSLT( https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/ZRy... ) 5 points|tambourine_man|2 months ago|1 comments (this list is incomplete. but we just had a power outage (including getting zapped, so i am submitting this now to not lose it)

_ache_

Anyone getting 403 Forbidden? I can't load this page.