Historically, Blink has split large text nodes that are longer than 64k. This behavior is non-standard and was added in WebKit back in 2007 to address a specific performance concern around text selection at the time (see commit f6d7c1c6fb65ee928f38934c601ffed72c02bbbd<https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f6d7c1c6fb65ee928f38934c601ffed72c02bbbd> <https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f6d7c1c6fb65ee928f38934c601ffed72c02bbbd> for details).
Many of Blink's optimizations since this time actually make this text node splitting a net-negative today (e.g. the parser fast path, LayoutNG, etc). In Chrome 151, we are removing this text splitting behavior. A Blink flag was added to restore the old behavior called "SplitLargeTextNodes", which can be enabled via adding `--enable-blink-features=SplitLargeTextNodes` to the command line arguments. This flag will be removed in M153. There is no visible change with this behavior - even with split nodes, the adjacent Text nodes were merged into a single layout box. The only developer-facing behavior is in the DOM structure (e.g. a node with 65k characters would have previously been automatically split into two Text nodes and now it won't be). A note on compatibility - WebKit still splits text at 64k, while Gecko does not. An incredibly small number of sites have text nodes this large, so we do not expect any live sites to depend on this behavior. The main use case is large plain-text documents. There are no web-tests for this behavior, as 64k is very large and the value is arbitrary. There are unit tests validating our behavior with and without the flag enabled. Bug: https://issues.chromium.org/issues/525278782 PR (merged today): Remove text node splitting at 64k (7932253) ยท Gerrit Code Review<https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/7932253> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/DS0PR00MB2541F4E6E0F9895B93B535ACD6EF2%40DS0PR00MB2541.namprd00.prod.outlook.com.
