That's exactly what the web is! It's made up of hundreds of such small standards plus thousands of ad-hoc implementations, solutions, and deep supporting infrastructure.
Yes exactly, too big is exactly what it is. And my point was that it could be small. In practice of course we'd never even agree on a definition of what the web is or what it should be, so even the idea of designing a compact standard for it is hopeless.
I think the problem here is big.
How about small standards with a limited scope? I don't want these huge standards that take millions of lines of code to implement.