#1177: Incubation: seamless page transition with deferred commit

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Opened Dec 9, 2025

Explainer

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-view-transitions-2/two-phase-transition-explainer.md#allowing-the-author-to-control-the-commit-scheduling

The explainer

Where and by whom is the work is being done?

  • GitHub repo: https://github.com/whatwg/html
  • Primary contacts: @noamr, Google Inc, Chromium engineer
  • Organization/project driving the design: Google
  • This work is being funded by: Google
  • Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design: WHATWG, see minutes from TPAC 2025
  • Standards group(s) that you expect to discuss and/or adopt this work when it's ready: <!-- "unknown" if not known -->

Feedback so far

  • Multi-stakeholder feedback:
    • Chromium comments: funding this work
    • Mozilla comments: TBD
    • WebKit comments: TBD
    • {{...include feedback/review from developers, implementers, civil society, and others}}
  • Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this design:

You should also know that...

No response

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Discussions

Discussed Dec 15, 2025 (See Github)

Hadley: Is this also CSS?

Matthew: Yes. Happy to have a look at it.

Lola: Looks like the explainer is for two-phase transition, looks like they only ask us to take a look at one of the proposed solutions. The link directly goes to the section they would like us to review.

Hadley: Doesn’t sound like an explainer?

Lola: Think we shouldn’t review this, this very much a WIP.

Hadley: I'm adding the "explainer missing" tag.

Christian: I can do it.

Lola: Based on what I see, they’re asking us about our feedback regarding different solutions, until they find one. Explainer itself contains an overview and context. Don’t know if it is enough. There is some security and privacy, but no a11y considerations. Don’t know if it would need it.

Hadley: If we’re not sure what they want, we should try and clarify that.

Matthew: There isn’t much of an explaination of why the explainer is what it is. There’s also no alternatives considered section, and the markdown is badly formatted. Assigned myself before we discussed it. Thanks Christian for joining. We should request clarification. There are also some minutes from TPAC.

Lola: I think we should finish the explainer and then come back to us. Sounds

Christian: If it’s okay for you, I would have a look and either ask for clarification or send them back?

Hadley: Don’t burn too much energy until their needs and intentions are clearer.

Discussed Jan 5, 2026 (See Github)

Christian: We talked about this just before the holidays. Hadley said the document is malformed and not really an explainer. 2 alternative proposals. We said we'd check it, and if it was still unclear, we'd ask for clarification. Still unclear today. We should ask for clarification, and for them to fix the explainer. They should also mention multi-stakeholder support.

Matthew: Please do that.

Comment by @christianliebel Jan 5, 2026 (See Github)

@noamr Thank you for your proposal. We reviewed the explainer and found that it contains some typos and malformed Markdown, making it difficult to understand the actual request. Specifically, it's unclear whether the two approaches (Allowing the author to control the commit scheduling and Allowing animations to defer commit for a short period) are alternative solutions or meant to complement each other. Could you please fix these issues in the explainer and get back to us?

Comment by @noamr Jan 6, 2026 (See Github)

@noamr Thank you for your proposal. We reviewed the explainer and found that it contains some typos and malformed Markdown, making it difficult to understand the actual request. Specifically, it's unclear whether the two approaches (Allowing the author to control the commit scheduling and Allowing animations to defer commit for a short period) are alternative solutions or meant to complement each other. Could you please fix these issues in the explainer and get back to us?

Thanks @christianliebel. I've fixed the issues with the Markdown and clarified the relationship between the proposed solutions.

Discussed Jan 12, 2026 (See Github)

Christian: No update.

Matthew: No update.

Martin: It might be interesting asking Tess to comment on this one. There was a similar proposal in the past. Tess had a strong opition that this would not be great for the web, given browser vendors want to make navigations quick, and this might add artificial delays, knowing that animations could potentially cover this. Issue was that the site doesn’t get the choice. It’s a different of covering the gap.

Christian to message Tess.