About dawm

dawm is a headless DOM toolkit for parsing, traversing, manipulating, and serializing HTML/SVG/XML documents. It is purpose-built for server-side, serverless, and edge compute environments where performance and portability are paramount.

The Problem

Existing server-side DOM solutions tend to fall into two camps: feature-rich but slow (like JSDOM), or fast but unfamiliar (custom APIs that require learning new paradigms). dawm bridges this gap with a Rust-powered WebAssembly parser that delivers near-native performance, wrapped in the standard DOM APIs that every web developer already knows.

Key Features

• Blazing fast — Rust/WASM core processes documents at near-native speed.
• Familiar API — Standard DOM interfaces: Document, Element, querySelector, and more.
• Zero dependencies — No external packages. Just dawm and your code.
• Secure — WASM sandbox prevents untrusted content from compromising your application.
• Portable — Runs in Deno, Bun, Node.js, and Cloudflare Workers.
• Standards compliant — Built on html5ever from the Servo project.

Use Cases

• Server-side rendering (SSR) frameworks
• Web scraping and data extraction
• HTML email template processing
• Unit testing DOM-dependent code without a browser
• Static site generation with dynamic content
• Content sanitization and transformation pipelines

The Team

dawm is created and maintained by Nicholas Berlette. Contributions from the community are welcome — see the GitHub repository for details on how to contribute.

License

dawm is dual-licensed under MIT and Apache-2.0.

Links

• GitHub Repository
• npm Package
• JSR Package
• Documentation