whatwg/html
Performance Issue: Main single-page specification loads whole spec at root URL
Ouverte
#12 782 ouverte le 13 août 2026
good first issuemetaspec tooling
Métriques du dépôt
- Stars
- (7 654 étoiles)
- Métriques de merge PR
- (Merge moyen 42j 18h) (22 PRs mergées en 30 j)
Description
What is the issue with the HTML Standard?
⚠️ Performance Issue: Main single-page specification loads whole spec at root URL
Description
Navigating to the root URL (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/) loads the entire HTML Living Standard as a single, monolithic document. This creates severe browser performance issues, especially on lower-spec hardware or mobile devices.
Impact / Symptoms
- High Memory Consumption: Loads over 15 MB of raw HTML and hundreds of thousands of DOM nodes in a single frame.
- Browser Freezing/Crashing: Tabs often hang, become unresponsive during rendering, or crash due to memory limits.
- Sluggish Native Search: Using
Ctrl+Fcauses massive layout recalculation and severe input lag.
Suggested Solutions
- Consider making the
/multipage/version the default landing view, or prominent default redirect. - Add an explicit, high-visibility banner at the top of the single-page view suggesting visitors switch to the
/multipage/or/dev/edition if they experience page lag.