the whole google xslt thing is a pattern

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/22/no-google-did-not-unilaterally-decide-to-kill-xslt/

It was mozilla who proposed it.

The public harassed the person who wrote something on an issue tracker.

Why was this on a public issue tracker? What was the goal? Who was the target audience?

Break out of the small work-group, get other browser developers involved. Non-goal: get the opinion from everyone who has a fedi and github account.

This isn’t for the issue’s intended audience, which was other people within WHATWG who are familiar with the usual process and each other

(having strong opinions because you’re an expert… in some other software)

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Public is unhappy with what’s going on, specifically that someone else makes a decision for them.

The direct result of the behavior that follows is that people retreat from open and public spaces to avoid this stuff.

More private channels. The public has even less say in what happens. No more public resources to try to understand the history, the decision making, etc.

In the free software communnity we do this because we believe in openness, we believe in allowing anyone to contribute, but it requires understanding things, having a voice.

This isn’t really about XSLT.

We have a similar problem in wayland protocols, and GNOME! People pile onto MRs where they perceive someone blocking progress. Besides making things less open, the behavior results in the opposite of what they want to achieve: the issue/MR becomes toxic, no progress is being made, people get angry at each other, the hope of finding a good solution which works for everyone vanishes.

(how big companies work)

“Google has trillions of dollars!” people hooted. Google has trillions of dollars. The Chrome team very much does not. They probably get, at best, a tiny fraction of one percent of those dollars. Whether Google should give the Chrome team more money is essentially irrelevant, because that’s not in the Chrome team’s control.

HOLY FUCK, LOOK AT FLATPAK/FLATHUB and Red Hat!

(harassment and death threats; how it feels like to have internet mob after you? person at google: I feel you.)

In a lot of ways, I wish a was the guy at google. XSLT will get removed. In a few month, no one will notice except a few people who will either accept that something they did 10 years ago isn’t so important anymore, or use the JS XSLT impl. No one will remember who opened the issue, and the angry internet mob will have moved to their next obsession.

That’s not the case if you work for GNOME on Wayland. Some people quite literally made it their job to find things on the wayland-protocols repo which can be converted into internet drama by any means necessary. They miss-represent what was said. They skip over things which are inconvenient to their story. They do not understand the issues at hand, because guess what, they are not a developer. Most importantly, they will not talk with the people involved, because they have no interest whatsoever at actually understanding the situation.

Those people have been told what the consequences of their actions are, yet their scheme has not changed.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair