Re: Putting limits on formatting element growth

On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:54:14 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:

> Then there's the issue of whitespace-only text nodes uselessly  
> reconstructing the list of active formatting elements. I think changing  
> this would be potentially more disruptive in terms of the code and test  
> cases involved. Also, making the most common tree builder mode ("in  
> body") sensitive to space characters vs. non-space characters would be a  
> performance problem if implemented naively not optimized properly (to go  
> on the fast track once one non-space character has been seen until a  
> non-character token is seen). Still, having seen a page like  
> http://saintjohnchurchmiddletown.com/default.aspx (warning! may slow  
> down your browsing considerably while loading) in the wild, I have to  
> wonder if we still should change the spec not to reconstruct the list of  
> active formatting elements on space characters.

I think this would be a good change. Old Gecko didn't reformat for line  
breaks. When I suggested changing the spec before to not reformat for  
whitespace, Hixie said the spec is as it is for compat, but didn't have a  
list of URLs that would break.

It seems the above URL works fine in Opera but is considerably slower in  
Firefox and Chrome with the HTML5 parser.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 13 September 2010 16:18:48 UTC