Recently there was a request to "Reconsider W3C Recommendation status of XSLT 2.0 and XSLT 3.0" (see https://github.com/w3ctag/obsoletion/issues/10).

In the process Dan Brickley made what I thought was an interesting comment:

I take this as evidence in favour of distinguishing 'Web Platform'

-oriented RECs from 'World Wide Web' RECs.

The former is concerned heavily with implementability, usability, coherent design, attack surface and technical debt issues. The latter is humanity's planet-wide shared memory. Once deployed, its data formats do not really ever go away, and thoughtful specs need to respect this reality. Many W3C efforts have aspects of both flavour of web standard, but are often closer to one cluster.

XSLT appears for now to be primarily a 'World Wide Web' standard, even if

0.02% of page loads is still a significant number for the parties trying to use those pages. XSLT will also continue chugging away in the background, unseen but enabling many other page views.

I don't want to reopen this github issue, but it is worth trying to come up

with a non-polarizing framing for where things like XSLT fit in the web standards landscape, and how W3C handles its ageing XML portfolio.

(see https://github.com/w3ctag/obsoletion/issues/10#issuecomment-3637735401)

I think this is an especially interesting point when we also consider that we have a mix of other things deployed in the world too, which aren't just in the browser: Web Views (and embedded views), IWAs, miniapps and so on... It would be interesting to see if there are non-polarizing (maybe more importantly some potentially helpful) ways to define these things...

<!-- Content below this is maintained by @w3c-tag-bot -->

---

Track conversations at https://tag-github-bot.w3.org/gh/w3ctag/design-reviews/1202