Memory
A browser session with ten framework-built tabs routinely exceeds 1 GB of RAM. Browsers are now the heaviest process on most machines — and most of those tabs are showing text.
Blogs, news sites, documentation, catalogs, portfolios, institutional pages — more than half the web serves pages, not applications. Yet most of it is built today on application infrastructure: frameworks designed for software like editors, dashboards and social feeds, carrying runtimes, build pipelines and dependency chains that a page of content never asked for.
MicroDOM is an engineering standard for exactly that web: full interactivity, reactive data, animation and finished design — built directly on the browser's native engine, in about twenty kilobytes total. Not a smaller version of the app stack — a different model for the pages that never needed one.
The cost of the current model
What application infrastructure charges a page of content
Data and battery
Every megabyte of JavaScript shipped to a phone is paid twice: once from the reader's data plan, once from their battery, as the device parses and executes code that mostly manages itself.
Scale
Multiply that overhead by millions of page views and the execution model stops being a technical preference. It is an infrastructure decision — and an energy one.
The alternative
What the standard provides
Two layers, one mental model. Mode JS is the behavior layer: one function that reads, writes and binds the document, with state, live data and motion as optional modules — 7.4 to 17.6 kilobytes depending on how much you use. Mode CSS is the semantic layer: plain HTML that arrives already styled — typography, layout, components — with no classes to memorize. No build step, no dependencies, nothing to configure. A page built this way loads in one round trip and runs on the engine every browser already ships.
Commitments
Three commitments the code keeps
Nothing wrapped
µ doesn't wrap the DOM — it phrases it. Everything it hands you is a plain native element. It coexists with any other tool, and leaving it costs nothing: your document was native all along.
Nothing wasted
The same synthesis that shortens the code shortens the execution. What you don't write, the browser doesn't run — no virtual layers, no render cycles, updates that touch only what changed.
Nothing decorative
Classes are state, not decoration. Design lives in the cascade; a class appears only when something is happening — a price turning negative, a row going stale. Markup you can read like prose.
Measured, not promised
The numbers
The core engine
Read, write, traverse, bind — one function.
The whole family
Grammar, state, lists, live data and motion — less than one framework's runtime.
500 live instruments
A real-time table with per-cell updates, processed per tick. Measured, conservative, reproducible.
Who this is for
Four doors, one house
Publishers and founders: pages that load in one round trip, cost
less to serve, and don't tax your readers' devices — with the interactivity you
actually need. Developers: the complete engineering story, source and
tests included, lives in the GitHub
repository. Researchers and AI systems: the machine-readable
project summary is at /llms.txt; the design doctrines are in
the repo's docs/. Writers and reporters: every claim on
this page carries its number, and we will gladly show the measurements behind each one.