I believe discussions of the merits of XSLT belong on some other list. :)
To finally put this thread to rest:
- As Ojan noted, we will not be removing any features of the Web
Platform which have significant usage, and no one is proposing
removing XSLT at this time. XSLT's usage is likely well over that
bar. Ojan is going to add some counters and we'll have better numbers
to report soon.
- I cannot personally recommend authors use XSLT (despite being the
author of WebKit/Blinks XSLTProcessor/XSLT support). The
non-incremental nature of XSLT (you pass your whole document to XSLT,
wait synchronously for it to return the transformed document) combined
with WebKit's poor implementation (WebKit parses the whole XML, then
re-serializes it to a string, then it gets re-parsed by libxml,
processed by libxslt, and then re-serialized for re-parsing by
WebKit!).
If client-side XSLT is to have a growing-future on the web (which it
very well may) I recommend interested parties write amazing
(JavaScript) libraries to do incremental XSLT processing and encourage
site authors to use them in lieu of browser native support.
Blink can-not/should-not provide every feature of the Web natively in
C++ and we're continue to try and move more and more of our code into
higher-level abstractions. If someone writes an amazing (and
license-compatible) JS implementation of XSLT, maybe we'll ship it as
part of Blink some day. It would be hard to perform worse than our
current implementation on top of libxslt!
Thank you all for your thoughts. We'll report back numbers when we
have some to report.