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Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

215 points by agumonkey 2y ago

doitnowdudes 2y ago
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tsobral 2y ago
I hope they're successful. I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable. For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose. My nostalgia wants some of the early 00s web again, but I believe in something between. Which consumes far less watts and potentially reducing many tons of e-waste globally.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago
  I'm skimming the linked Web Sustainability Guidelines. It's pretty much the normal stuff HN-types have been banging on about in every thread on webdev for the last decade or two. I don't really see how this will change anything.
  - Y-bar 2y ago
    Now it can carry a weight similar to WCAG levels, which means that product managers and customers might pay more attention to these requirements, especially if they like ticking boxes. "Our new update means we reach WGAC 2 Level AA to > 90% and WSG to 60%, next release we aim to reach WSG to >70%" might be something we hear next year.
    - zelon88 2y ago
      Do you really think the same news organizations that send the user 4mb worth of cross origin Javascript just to show 6kb of text is really gonna back track like that?
      - solarkraft 2y ago
        I think that it will make it easier for people to justify efforts they already want to do. And that’s something, I guess.
      - whatshisface 2y ago
        That cross-orign JavaScript is their revenue.
      - Y-bar 2y ago
        Yes. I live and work with this and I think it will help. It's not going to be quick, or a silver bullet, but very few problems in this world have quick and easy solutions.
  - compressedgas 2y ago
    I looked to see what those guidelines had. It has nothing about pages actually having contents if JavaScript isn't ran or CSS isn't supported.
- reaperducer 2y ago
  I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable. I completely agree. However, I think browsers are also to blame in some part. On web sites that I build, I sometimes get alerts from Safari that my page is bogging down the computer and it offers to "reduce protections" to make the page perform better. But this is always on pages that are plain HTML and CSS, and don't even have animations. No Javascript. No canvas. Not even forms. And the total payload is often less than 20K. I don't know what else I can do to make it lighter.
  - bschwindHN 2y ago
    Do you have any examples? I believe you, but I've literally never seen this before. Is this desktop or mobile Safari?
- cle 2y ago
  > that add zero value to the intended purpose Well...to your intended purpose. They're often better aligned with the purpose of keeping the business running.
- bschwindHN 2y ago
  > For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose I'm still running the original iPhone SE from 2016, and there are basically two things that will reliably heat up the phone and absolutely destroy the battery: news websites, and the github web frontend. It's pathetic how many resources these things use when their main job is to essentially display some text to you. The github native app works completely fine which shows it's not a problem with the phone, it's a problem with devs not caring at all about performance.
  - AstroJetson 2y ago
    Reading this and replying on a 2014 IPad Air. About 70% of the sites I goto work just fine. Oddly, about 1/2 of GitHub works. Old.reddit works, FB is horribly broke. So it’s clearly a resource thing. The more complicated the Javascript, the worse things run. So it’s not only the resources needed by page, but that older devices end up in landfills.
- kreims 2y ago
  RSS is a pretty good way around this. Disabling JavaScript is also a good option to cut down on the silliness. If it breaks the site, it was probably not worth reading.
- ricardo81 2y ago
  I recall in the early 00's people would proudly display that their HTML/CSS was 100% valid. Maybe a badge/score to say how well a site is for efficiency, at least for the front end. Unused code etc being deductible from say a score of 100.
- troupo 2y ago
  > I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable. For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose. How will w3c sustainability group run by people from irrelevant organizations help with that? Google is responsible for one of the largest chunks of bloat with its ads, embeds, tag manager, analytics etc. And they couldn't care less. They could penalise sites, but instead they now say that loading a page in under 2.5 seconds is fast: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vitals.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit...
thepangolino 2y ago
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Theodores 2y ago
This is a brilliant initiative. I think that less is more. Recently I was trying to inspect Twitter/X to obtain a video. You would not believe how many nested 'div' elements it was buried under. I also had to do a X icon to replace the Twitter bird. So I went to get the official one and make it into my lean SVG. Again, you would not believe how much bloat was in what should have been a very simple file. This is no rant about Twitter, the web in general is 99% bloat. I don't believe Google have 'stewarded' the web well enough to keep it lean. If we go with the icon example, an icon has to be simple or else it is not an icon. Yet we have huge icon sets as fonts with excessive bloat. This is why I end up having to hand-carve SVG assets on the regular. This aspect of simplicity applies to web pages too. Style sheets should not be thousands of lines. Content does not need to be nested in a billion divs, particularly since no div elements are needed now we have content sectioning elements and CSS grid layout. The leanness of a website should be important as an expression of brand values for companies. For example, if your business is making cars, your website should be the fastest loading one to reflect your 0-60 times. Hopefully we will get metrics for efficiency as one of things like accessibility that people strive for in varying degrees, with this efficiency being good for SEO. As it is, Google prefer data to be poorly structured as wading through rubbish is what their business depends on. If all content was well organised without the bloat then others would be able to do search to compete with Google. Hence we have a sea of divs on every web page, even though MDN docs says the div element is the element of last resort.
- longtimelistnr 2y ago
  Twitter regularly changes the location of source videos because as X they now charge for the ability to download them directly. I've also noticed on iOS, if you attempt to screen record a video the app essentially crashes or glitches the video player.
  - rozap 2y ago
    As with many things, the solution is ffmpeg. After I got that upsell thing when I tried to download a video about a week ago, I found the correct ffmpeg incantation, mostly out of spite for Twitter. If you find the m3u8 request in devtools on a tweet, you can use something like the following: ffmpeg -i 'https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1846357395959615488/pu/pl/ecNx-sTzYA9doHYO.m3u8' -analyzeduration 5G -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 96k output.mp4 (if anyone runs that command...you're welcome for the meme, unfortunately I don't know where it came from)
Y-bar 2y ago
I like this, hope it results in some actionable recommendations I can use to avoid "yet another JS library that achieves the thing that we can already do with modern HTML+CSS" (if only my colleagues were willing to learn anything besides React that is...)
throawayonthe 2y ago
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zelon88 2y ago
From the manifesto... > The products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and material resources possible. Is this from the same W3C that has been pushing us all since 2013 to upload our locally hosted files to one of 3 major cloud providers who just happen to be megadonors to W3C? Funny now that we have to send our personal files across the internet. I wonder what the sustainability "under/over" is gonna be when I have to send packets around the world to retrieve the files that used to live on my computer. https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/wiki/Cloud_Computing_Accessibility.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/wiki/Cloud_Computing_Accessibility...
- nox101 2y ago
  Are you suggesting we'd use less energy and materials if we stored things on physical media and when we needed to share something we send a physical copy via snail-mail or courier?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - mihaaly 2y ago
    I believe he suggest to establish a chain of smoke signal towers transmitting the bits of our holiday photos to our distant relatives. During the day and when there is no wind of course. There is no alterntive between storing everything in the cloud and smoke towers. (still, I assume not the cloud storage is the most energy intensive thingy out there - but perhaps the processing of those for whatever agenda, and else - but the w3 signals are mixed the least. Perhaps this is from some sort of common corporate script book distributed in the MBI courses, from the chapter "how to pretend being serious environmentalist", mixed with the other one "deflect inconvenient/expensive steps into the infinite future or never by forming an interest group")
  - NegativeLatency 2y ago
    Probably suggesting that cloud storage and cloud server products use energy less efficiently than a more simple setup
vegadw 2y ago
What, uh, do they think they're going to do? Tell people "Static sites are cool actually.". ""the IG plans to liaise with regulatory bodies to improve compliance targets"" Regulatory bodies absolutely do not care about W3C. Hell, they barely care about the IETF, IEEE, ICANN, etc. I'm all for pushing for sustainability, but look at the other interest groups. For example, privacy. Cloudflare just published an article talking about post-quantum crypto [1] where they talk about how wild a percent of traffic would be just cert exchange (and, currently already is). There will always be competing interests, so a body that only exists to checks notes talk about ""sustainability"" on the web feels moot. They explicitly say hardware is out of scope. Cool. So software. The only way to help sustainability is to use less or make it more efficient. Less never happens, and efficiency isn't a concern above ad revenue for literally anyone. Honestly, I'm inclined to see this as actively harmful more than anything. Putting out statements about sustainability just dilutes the waters on web issues they might have real pull in, like standards for user privacy that DO help with sustainability. For example, making it easier to choose what content gets delivered cough DNS blackhole adblock cough means less data being transfered. I still wish this group the best and hope that they can discuss actions of other groups (Such as the Media and Entertainment Interest Group) in context of their choice of standards impact on processing power requirements. Honestly, reading the manifesto [2] just makes me more angry. It doesn't say anything. Go read some solar-punk manifestos by people on the Indie Web or in Solarpunk culture. Those at least say something. This is just marketing fluff for the sponsors at the bottom of the page. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/another-look-at-pq-signatures/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/another-look-at-pq-signatures/ [2] https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com
- Y-bar 2y ago
  > Regulatory bodies absolutely do not care about W3C. I suspect it will come as news to you that many governments do base laws and regulations on W3C https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ including EU and US Department of Justice https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/ https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/
- kokanee 2y ago
  > What, uh, do they think they're going to do? They published a charter. They're going to establish guidelines for sustainable web development and tools for measuring your impact. Yes, static architectures will probably be one path for improvement. > There will always be competing interests, so a body that only exists to checks notes talk about ""sustainability"" on the web feels moot. I'm not following this point. The existence of entrenched interests means that no opposing interests should be researched? Why is "sustainability" in quotes, is it not a legitimate pursuit, or are you implying that they have ulterior motives? > They explicitly say hardware is out of scope. Cool. Hardware is out of scope "unless related to hosting & infrastructure," AKA the cloud. That is an absolutely massive scope within the hardware realm. > Honestly, reading the manifesto [2] just makes me more angry. It doesn't say anything. It sounds like you're looking for the guidelines that this group aims to publish. A manifesto in this context is not intended to be a solution or a prescription; it's a framework for alignment towards a goal. The concrete solutions are the goal of the group.
crabmusket 2y ago
> The guidelines are best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, web workers, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers. Was I the only one thrown momentarily by the use of "web worker" to refer to a human?
tannhaeuser 2y ago
This is coming from the same W3C, Inc. that used to publish HTML standards, or at least review spec snapshots created by (the loose group of Chrome devs and other individuals financed by Google called) WHATWG, but stopped doing so finally last year ([1], or actually already in 2021) to focus on delivering more totally unbloated and sustainable CSS instead. [1]: https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html
- bitpush 2y ago
  God forbid if people are paid to work on something.
palsecam 2y ago
Related: — “The leanternet principles” <https://leanternet.com/ https://leanternet.com/> — “The 250KB Club - The Web Is Doom” <https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/>
- culi 2y ago
  Also: — “Sustainable Web Design” <https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ https://sustainablewebdesign.org/> — ”Other 'clubs'”: no-js.club, 1mb.club, 512kb.club, 250kb.club, 10kbclub.com, 1kb.club, js1k.com, js1024.fun — “CSS Minecraft – written in 100% HTML/CSS with 0 javascript” <https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/ https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/> — “Low Tech – a solar-powered website” <https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/>
tatarin 2y ago
If there're no Alphabet employees on the board of this group who can veto any decision, it'll be safely ignored by them. They fully own and control Chrome and make profit from ads, so why would they pay any attention to "decluttering" which could bring less ads? Since Manifest v3 shame there's no chance web would get any less ads. Only more. Much more.
Abismith 2y ago
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userbinator 2y ago
It's a good effort, but a lot of this stuff reads more like the usual bureaucratic virtue-signaling that's popular these days. All that's needed to drastically decrease energy use is to just take late-90s/early 2000s web technology and push it to its limits. Zero JS unless absolutely necessary. Two days ago I was watching the election results on various sites, along with many others. Some sites just didn't work in a slightly older browser, and those which did were still consuming a lot more resources than they really needed. It shouldn't require the latest in web technologies and computing hardware to show a simple dynamically updating outline map.
- CuriousCosmic 2y ago
  Is there a reason why there seemingly aren't any frameworks to do all the fancy web flourish in a normal language and then have it compile down to plain HTML5 + CSS + SVG?
  - aaronblohowiak 2y ago
    not sure what you mean, but htmx might be what you are looking for?
    - zekrioca 2y ago
      You are not sure what they meant, yet you think you know what they are looking for?
      - Buttons840 2y ago
        I am not sure this dice will roll less than six, but I think it will.
        zekrioca 2y ago
        I am not sure what you meant, but I am sure there is a function with an infinite number of possibilities that it is really relatable to something.
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
Ban React and other bloated js "frameworks" and watch in awe how the emissions go down.
PikachuEXE 2y ago
Sustainability: The Tyranny of the 21st Century https://newdiscourses.com/2021/10/sustainability-tyranny-21st-century/ https://newdiscourses.com/2021/10/sustainability-tyranny-21s... Sustainability is going to be the buzzword of the century. Everywhere we turn, we hear about sustainable practices in business and industry, sustainable foods and agriculture, sustainable energy, and so on. Businesses and governments sign on to “Sustainable Development Goals,” and so civil responsibility is framed in terms of this seemingly simple idea: sustainability. What does sustainability entail, though? What informs it? In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks through Herbert Marcuse’s New Leftism of the 1960s and 1970s and explains how sustainability has become Marcuse’s “New Sensibility.” In other words, sustainability is the new way of thinking about the world so that we can have liberation, which is to say Communism. Join James in this groundbreaking episode of the New Discourses Podcast to explore this idea at its ominous roots.
- zekrioca 2y ago
  I’m having a hard time understanding what your problem with the “sustainability” concept is. Don’t you think that “efficiency” was the tyrant of the 20th century yet no one complains about it in the 21st century? What about “AI”? Yes, sustainability will mean different things across different domains, because for some reason people are starting to realize the consequences of their actions in the real world. What else would you expect?
kettlecorn 2y ago
I was sort of hoping that this was about sustaining the web itself and preventing things like link rot and centralization of content in non-web privately owned platforms. Still, this is important too.
webprofusion 2y ago
The most sustainable thing we could do for web capable devices is to make right to repair mandatory and include in that driver specifications required for custom software/firmware. e.g. an old iPad is now obsolete, but it may work fine it just can't connect to modern TLS and doesn't trust new root CA certs. If it was possible to updated old devices with any custom OS, many devices would continue to work instead of being disposed of.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Yup, I have two perfectly good iPads sitting in a drawer nearly-unusable for modern online things because Apple and the web have left them behind (and all apps that have online services are no longer functional of course). The hardware is mint, the battery is good, everything in tip-top shape, but... forced obsolescence. The actual CPU/hardware are absolutely powerful enough to perform all basic computing tasks including web browsing, but Apple would prefer I just throw these away and buy a new iPad (as if that's going to happen). It's really abhorrent to me that this borderline-godlike technology is supposed to just be... thrown away after a few years? Like, I'm going to be blunt: what the fuck?
  - acomjean 2y ago
    I have an iPad that is in that state too. Hardware is fine, os can’t be updated. I wish I could jail break it or install an alternative os. It’s only useful to play the few games I have for it (most of those haven’t been upgraded to 64 bit so don’t run on new OS and hardware). It’s good hardware but I feel very much at the whim of Apple.
    - amatecha 2y ago
      Yeah, it's so frustrating. There's the "opposite" problem too where old software I had is no longer on App Store, and simply cannot run on newer versions of iOS. I finally had to say goodbye to my friend's awesome photography app that applied a really nice B&W effect which was unique to that app. I'll never be able to use it again, unless I carry around an old/outdated iPhone with me.
austin-cheney 2y ago
Everyone in the comments wants to blame JavaScript for the world’s ills. That is both stupid and grossly uninformed. When you live next to a Google or Facebook data center some reality starts to set in. They easily consume most of the output of a single small urban power plant on their own. It’s nuts. I didn’t realize how nuts it is until someone explained it to me, in my part time job I work with a Houston based power company lawyer that specializes in contracts for data centers. I doubt those massive data centers are reliant on JavaScript. As for JavaScript there is a simple solution that works wonders in every other industry: licensing and liability. The code is bad because the developers that write it are shit. That’s never going to change until businesses have a financial incentive to train for competence. All the wishful thinking about less JavaScript is just more virtue signaling.
- eadmund 2y ago
  The client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the server-side efficiency problem is Python?
  - ori_b 2y ago
    The server side efficiency problem is running advertising.
    - Drakim 2y ago
      The some of the brightest minds of our generation has been wasted on optimizing how to deliver personalized advertisements in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and the true tragedy is that they didn't have a more efficient language than JavaScript to do it.
      - austin-cheney 2y ago
        It really doesn't matter. Advertisement is the debt collection of software. Its this shit nobody wants to do. As a result these people tend to make more, be pampered, and the output is generally still garbage and the developers are still depressed. Compare that with gaming where the developers are worked to death and generally underpaid, but they love what they do and have a great time building amazing things.
righthand 2y ago
Small bundle sizes are anti-Google/Facebook/et al. Google/Facebook needs to create standards to maintain control of the web and then incentivize implementation of those features in bundles. Chrome itself has a huge resource footprint, that often mirrors the common Ruby-ism about high resource usage.
PikachuEXE 2y ago
> The Sustainable Web IG will publish the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG). This set of guidelines and associated materials were drafted by the Sustainable Web Design Community Group. The WSG explains how to design and implement digital products and services that put people and the planet first. The guidelines are best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, web workers, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers. They are in line with the Sustainable Web Manifesto and aligned with GRI Standards and the UN Sustainable Development Goals to help organizations incorporate digital products and services into broader sustainability reporting initiatives. These guidelines will enable people to better understand the Internet’s impact on sustainability reporting. This includes emissions as well as stewardship principles. Exposing the Sustainable Development Goals https://youtu.be/ZW2tkK52U-o https://youtu.be/ZW2tkK52U-o We are halfway through a plot to seize control of the world. It may seem like a conspiracy theory, but it's placed awfully prominently, and everywhere, to be such a thing. The United Nations Agenda 2030 is a sweeping program to take control of our entire world. It launched in 2015 with an ambitious "17 Goals to Transform our World" and 169 targets to hit by the year 2030. That was eight years ago, and we can get a sense of how it's going. Badly. Tyrannically. Farcically. Reading from the Agenda announcement itself, in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay introduces the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations Agenda 2030 and shows how every one of them grants the pretext to seize control over the world and all human life and activity in it. Join him to know your enemy.
deleted 2y ago
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simgt 2y ago
Blame JS all you want but the problem of sustainability is, sadly, not a technical one. Write it in Python or C if what you're doing is endlessly pushing video memes or SEO-optimized "content", that's still wasted energy. A nuclear and solar grid powered 3 tons vehicle isn't much more sustainable than an ICE one if it's still carrying 1.1 human on average.
crabbone 2y ago
What I really dislike about this article is that it uses of "Web" and "Internet" interchangeably. Both technologies have problems, but they are different. It also feels like deflecting the blame (possibly unintentionally) from Web (which is in a really bad state) towards Internet, that's kind of OK, not great not awful. I.e. blaming the Internet for being one of the greatest polluters seems disingenuous, because... what if 90% of that pollution comes from Web? So, maybe the Internet works fine, but the Web needs fixing?
cpach 2y ago
Will we really move the needle on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with advice like this…? “Since the advent of the modern web, the ability to include embedded fonts and provide a more customized experience has seen their use explode. They aren't always the most performant option (which poses emissions hazards) and come with a few issues such as Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC) / Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT) which should be addressed.” IMO, if we want reduced emissions, citizens in all countries need to tell our leaders/representatives that the monetary cost of polluting must increase, until emissions are drastically decreased – i.e. we must internalize these negative externalities. In the EU, we have the Emissions Trading System for this purpose. If we don’t demand this from our leaders, how can we expect emissions to decrease? I’m sure a group like the Sustainable Web Interest Group can come up with a bunch of nice ideas, but I’m not convinced they can solve climate change. Sure, stuff like embedded fonts might possibly increase emissions. But if W3C are advicing against their usage, where’s the data that supports this guideline? (A Pigouvian tax can be another alternative, but harder to implement in EU, since taxes here are collected on the nation-level.)
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  I will always maintain that browsers and maybe even the OS should ship with a set of popular and well used fonts instead of just the same five """system""" fonts. Serving Inter, Open Sans, Roboto, Lato, and the like over and over and over and over does nothing except waste electricity. This is usually the point where whataboutism strikes and people "require" conversations around what constitutes a popular font. Browsers are already full of analytics and can record this. Google Fonts serves probably billions of font requests a day, so they can record this. Have the usual Big Tech bunch agree to start shipping the top, say 100, most popular fonts in their OS and/or browsers.
  - hanniabu 2y ago
    Browsers should also come packages with the most popular is libraries like jQuery, bootstrap, vue, d3, etc (not a real list, just off the top of my head)
    - 2y ago
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I would think one top sustainable idea is to state your content succintly and clearly This was nearly entirely bureaucratic bollocks, but here and there you can parse some useful information. I think. Was this written with the aid of AI? It seems having an AI that summerize all of it would be a big win.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
Here is an idea. Just get rid of all the ads and related code and infrastructure. and all the extra calls here and there for tracking and spying. That would save a shitload of required processing and network traffic.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  It would also get rid of a lot of terrible websites with shitty content (AI or human generated) which can only exist because of the ad revenue, saving even more resources.
octacat 2y ago
"The digital industry is responsible for 2-5% of global emissions, more than the aviation industry" - we should not count mining as a digital industry. I can optimize webpage a bit, it would totally not affect how much energy bitcoin would burn (i.e. it would burn as much as possible, unless it is not profitable). We could move AI training to some other category too. Idk, I work with erlang, we can do several million connections on a single server for lightweight processing tasks. It is highly optimized, and it is still not the number one selling point for many users.
rel_ic 2y ago
"Sustainability" is the opposite of efficiency. To be sustainable we have to consume less and stop growing. "Efficiency" just empowers us to eat the planet faster. Internalize the costs of energy as a first step. If you manage to make web fonts cost $2 per load, people will find their own ways to use less of them. If you make web fonts CHEAPER to load by making them "more efficient," then people will use MORE of them!
mediumsmart 2y ago
have they found the e-bacteria that eats content garbage? god speed me hearties.
etiennebausson 2y ago
It is interesting how the pollution & energy consumption situation evolve parallel to offline society. I will nominate AI for the role of 'Big Oil'.
nonameiguess 2y ago
I guess the death of web search is finally hitting me, too, as I can't find anything that looks like a reliable source, but blog spam market research seems to claim anywhere from 60% to 90% of all web traffic is streaming video. Something to keep in mind for everyone who wants to blame JavaScript and advertising. With hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding, plus localized edge caching, this traffic is probably as efficient as it will ever get already, and the only way to cut energy usage would be to reverse the content explosion and consumer addiction. Given current trends, that seems unlikely. If anything, with LLMs that can do both CGI and storycrafting, it will get even less efficient as content is generated rather than serving stored files.
SnoozingBoa 2y ago
I am interested if someone has written a document/post/article that approaches ”web needs simplification” in current context in holistic manner. E.g. Considering energy consumption, development costs, tooling complexity, state of web standards, private and public industry domain needs etc. I personally see different problems in many of the areas, but I’d like to know if someone has already organised these topics.
throw7 2y ago
Do they include crypto as part of their "digital industry" pollution metric? I mean it's all warm & fuzzy to want leaner, more efficient websites, but there ain't nothing like cranking hashes 24/7 @100%cpus.
robertlagrant 2y ago
It would be good to have an actual accounting that isn't just the cost of the Web. The Web also provides massive benefits environmentally. People drive / travel less because of online events, e.g. gaming, online services, e.g. banking, and remote work. Offices use much less paper than they used to. Power-hungry radio transmitters are replaced by lightweight bytes on a wire. I'd love to know the net effect of all of that. And the "digital industry" in the first paragraph: is that everything digital globally, including crypto? Or is it just the stuff this WIG can address, i.e. the Web?

215 points by agumonkey 2y ago

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I hope they're successful. I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable. For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose. My nostalgia wants some of the early 00s web again, but I believe in something between. Which consumes far less watts and potentially reducing many tons of e-waste globally.

edflsafoiewq 2y ago
I'm skimming the linked Web Sustainability Guidelines. It's pretty much the normal stuff HN-types have been banging on about in every thread on webdev for the last decade or two. I don't really see how this will change anything.
- Y-bar 2y ago
  Now it can carry a weight similar to WCAG levels, which means that product managers and customers might pay more attention to these requirements, especially if they like ticking boxes. "Our new update means we reach WGAC 2 Level AA to > 90% and WSG to 60%, next release we aim to reach WSG to >70%" might be something we hear next year.
  - zelon88 2y ago
    Do you really think the same news organizations that send the user 4mb worth of cross origin Javascript just to show 6kb of text is really gonna back track like that?
    - solarkraft 2y ago
      I think that it will make it easier for people to justify efforts they already want to do. And that’s something, I guess.
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      That cross-orign JavaScript is their revenue.
    - Y-bar 2y ago
      Yes. I live and work with this and I think it will help. It's not going to be quick, or a silver bullet, but very few problems in this world have quick and easy solutions.
- compressedgas 2y ago
  I looked to see what those guidelines had. It has nothing about pages actually having contents if JavaScript isn't ran or CSS isn't supported.
reaperducer 2y ago
I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable. I completely agree. However, I think browsers are also to blame in some part. On web sites that I build, I sometimes get alerts from Safari that my page is bogging down the computer and it offers to "reduce protections" to make the page perform better. But this is always on pages that are plain HTML and CSS, and don't even have animations. No Javascript. No canvas. Not even forms. And the total payload is often less than 20K. I don't know what else I can do to make it lighter.
- bschwindHN 2y ago
  Do you have any examples? I believe you, but I've literally never seen this before. Is this desktop or mobile Safari?
cle 2y ago
> that add zero value to the intended purpose Well...to your intended purpose. They're often better aligned with the purpose of keeping the business running.
bschwindHN 2y ago
> For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose I'm still running the original iPhone SE from 2016, and there are basically two things that will reliably heat up the phone and absolutely destroy the battery: news websites, and the github web frontend. It's pathetic how many resources these things use when their main job is to essentially display some text to you. The github native app works completely fine which shows it's not a problem with the phone, it's a problem with devs not caring at all about performance.
- AstroJetson 2y ago
  Reading this and replying on a 2014 IPad Air. About 70% of the sites I goto work just fine. Oddly, about 1/2 of GitHub works. Old.reddit works, FB is horribly broke. So it’s clearly a resource thing. The more complicated the Javascript, the worse things run. So it’s not only the resources needed by page, but that older devices end up in landfills.
kreims 2y ago
RSS is a pretty good way around this. Disabling JavaScript is also a good option to cut down on the silliness. If it breaks the site, it was probably not worth reading.
ricardo81 2y ago
I recall in the early 00's people would proudly display that their HTML/CSS was 100% valid. Maybe a badge/score to say how well a site is for efficiency, at least for the front end. Unused code etc being deductible from say a score of 100.
troupo 2y ago
> I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable. For example any news website, in order to read some text, you need to load a ton of JavaScript, ads (some even video) that add zero value to the intended purpose. How will w3c sustainability group run by people from irrelevant organizations help with that? Google is responsible for one of the largest chunks of bloat with its ads, embeds, tag manager, analytics etc. And they couldn't care less. They could penalise sites, but instead they now say that loading a page in under 2.5 seconds is fast: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vitals.html https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/the-science-behind-web-vit...

thepangolino 2y ago

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Theodores 2y ago

This is a brilliant initiative. I think that less is more. Recently I was trying to inspect Twitter/X to obtain a video. You would not believe how many nested 'div' elements it was buried under. I also had to do a X icon to replace the Twitter bird. So I went to get the official one and make it into my lean SVG. Again, you would not believe how much bloat was in what should have been a very simple file. This is no rant about Twitter, the web in general is 99% bloat. I don't believe Google have 'stewarded' the web well enough to keep it lean. If we go with the icon example, an icon has to be simple or else it is not an icon. Yet we have huge icon sets as fonts with excessive bloat. This is why I end up having to hand-carve SVG assets on the regular. This aspect of simplicity applies to web pages too. Style sheets should not be thousands of lines. Content does not need to be nested in a billion divs, particularly since no div elements are needed now we have content sectioning elements and CSS grid layout. The leanness of a website should be important as an expression of brand values for companies. For example, if your business is making cars, your website should be the fastest loading one to reflect your 0-60 times. Hopefully we will get metrics for efficiency as one of things like accessibility that people strive for in varying degrees, with this efficiency being good for SEO. As it is, Google prefer data to be poorly structured as wading through rubbish is what their business depends on. If all content was well organised without the bloat then others would be able to do search to compete with Google. Hence we have a sea of divs on every web page, even though MDN docs says the div element is the element of last resort.

longtimelistnr 2y ago
Twitter regularly changes the location of source videos because as X they now charge for the ability to download them directly. I've also noticed on iOS, if you attempt to screen record a video the app essentially crashes or glitches the video player.
- rozap 2y ago
  As with many things, the solution is ffmpeg. After I got that upsell thing when I tried to download a video about a week ago, I found the correct ffmpeg incantation, mostly out of spite for Twitter. If you find the m3u8 request in devtools on a tweet, you can use something like the following: ffmpeg -i 'https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1846357395959615488/pu/pl/ecNx-sTzYA9doHYO.m3u8' -analyzeduration 5G -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 96k output.mp4 (if anyone runs that command...you're welcome for the meme, unfortunately I don't know where it came from)

Y-bar 2y ago

I like this, hope it results in some actionable recommendations I can use to avoid "yet another JS library that achieves the thing that we can already do with modern HTML+CSS" (if only my colleagues were willing to learn anything besides React that is...)

throawayonthe 2y ago

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zelon88 2y ago

From the manifesto... > The products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and material resources possible. Is this from the same W3C that has been pushing us all since 2013 to upload our locally hosted files to one of 3 major cloud providers who just happen to be megadonors to W3C? Funny now that we have to send our personal files across the internet. I wonder what the sustainability "under/over" is gonna be when I have to send packets around the world to retrieve the files that used to live on my computer. https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/wiki/Cloud_Computing_Accessibility.html https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/wiki/Cloud_Computing_Accessibility...

nox101 2y ago
Are you suggesting we'd use less energy and materials if we stored things on physical media and when we needed to share something we send a physical copy via snail-mail or courier?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mihaaly 2y ago
  I believe he suggest to establish a chain of smoke signal towers transmitting the bits of our holiday photos to our distant relatives. During the day and when there is no wind of course. There is no alterntive between storing everything in the cloud and smoke towers. (still, I assume not the cloud storage is the most energy intensive thingy out there - but perhaps the processing of those for whatever agenda, and else - but the w3 signals are mixed the least. Perhaps this is from some sort of common corporate script book distributed in the MBI courses, from the chapter "how to pretend being serious environmentalist", mixed with the other one "deflect inconvenient/expensive steps into the infinite future or never by forming an interest group")
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Probably suggesting that cloud storage and cloud server products use energy less efficiently than a more simple setup

vegadw 2y ago

What, uh, do they think they're going to do? Tell people "Static sites are cool actually.". ""the IG plans to liaise with regulatory bodies to improve compliance targets"" Regulatory bodies absolutely do not care about W3C. Hell, they barely care about the IETF, IEEE, ICANN, etc. I'm all for pushing for sustainability, but look at the other interest groups. For example, privacy. Cloudflare just published an article talking about post-quantum crypto [1] where they talk about how wild a percent of traffic would be just cert exchange (and, currently already is). There will always be competing interests, so a body that only exists to checks notes talk about ""sustainability"" on the web feels moot. They explicitly say hardware is out of scope. Cool. So software. The only way to help sustainability is to use less or make it more efficient. Less never happens, and efficiency isn't a concern above ad revenue for literally anyone. Honestly, I'm inclined to see this as actively harmful more than anything. Putting out statements about sustainability just dilutes the waters on web issues they might have real pull in, like standards for user privacy that DO help with sustainability. For example, making it easier to choose what content gets delivered cough DNS blackhole adblock cough means less data being transfered. I still wish this group the best and hope that they can discuss actions of other groups (Such as the Media and Entertainment Interest Group) in context of their choice of standards impact on processing power requirements. Honestly, reading the manifesto [2] just makes me more angry. It doesn't say anything. Go read some solar-punk manifestos by people on the Indie Web or in Solarpunk culture. Those at least say something. This is just marketing fluff for the sponsors at the bottom of the page. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/another-look-at-pq-signatures/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/another-look-at-pq-signatures/ [2] https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com

Y-bar 2y ago
> Regulatory bodies absolutely do not care about W3C. I suspect it will come as news to you that many governments do base laws and regulations on W3C https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ including EU and US Department of Justice https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/ https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/
kokanee 2y ago
> What, uh, do they think they're going to do? They published a charter. They're going to establish guidelines for sustainable web development and tools for measuring your impact. Yes, static architectures will probably be one path for improvement. > There will always be competing interests, so a body that only exists to checks notes talk about ""sustainability"" on the web feels moot. I'm not following this point. The existence of entrenched interests means that no opposing interests should be researched? Why is "sustainability" in quotes, is it not a legitimate pursuit, or are you implying that they have ulterior motives? > They explicitly say hardware is out of scope. Cool. Hardware is out of scope "unless related to hosting & infrastructure," AKA the cloud. That is an absolutely massive scope within the hardware realm. > Honestly, reading the manifesto [2] just makes me more angry. It doesn't say anything. It sounds like you're looking for the guidelines that this group aims to publish. A manifesto in this context is not intended to be a solution or a prescription; it's a framework for alignment towards a goal. The concrete solutions are the goal of the group.

crabmusket 2y ago

> The guidelines are best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, web workers, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers. Was I the only one thrown momentarily by the use of "web worker" to refer to a human?

tannhaeuser 2y ago

This is coming from the same W3C, Inc. that used to publish HTML standards, or at least review spec snapshots created by (the loose group of Chrome devs and other individuals financed by Google called) WHATWG, but stopped doing so finally last year ([1], or actually already in 2021) to focus on delivering more totally unbloated and sustainable CSS instead. [1]: https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html

bitpush 2y ago
God forbid if people are paid to work on something.

palsecam 2y ago

Related: — “The leanternet principles” <https://leanternet.com/ https://leanternet.com/> — “The 250KB Club - The Web Is Doom” <https://250kb.club/ https://250kb.club/>

culi 2y ago
Also: — “Sustainable Web Design” <https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ https://sustainablewebdesign.org/> — ”Other 'clubs'”: no-js.club, 1mb.club, 512kb.club, 250kb.club, 10kbclub.com, 1kb.club, js1k.com, js1024.fun — “CSS Minecraft – written in 100% HTML/CSS with 0 javascript” <https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/ https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/> — “Low Tech – a solar-powered website” <https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/>

tatarin 2y ago

If there're no Alphabet employees on the board of this group who can veto any decision, it'll be safely ignored by them. They fully own and control Chrome and make profit from ads, so why would they pay any attention to "decluttering" which could bring less ads? Since Manifest v3 shame there's no chance web would get any less ads. Only more. Much more.

Abismith 2y ago

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userbinator 2y ago

It's a good effort, but a lot of this stuff reads more like the usual bureaucratic virtue-signaling that's popular these days. All that's needed to drastically decrease energy use is to just take late-90s/early 2000s web technology and push it to its limits. Zero JS unless absolutely necessary. Two days ago I was watching the election results on various sites, along with many others. Some sites just didn't work in a slightly older browser, and those which did were still consuming a lot more resources than they really needed. It shouldn't require the latest in web technologies and computing hardware to show a simple dynamically updating outline map.

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
Is there a reason why there seemingly aren't any frameworks to do all the fancy web flourish in a normal language and then have it compile down to plain HTML5 + CSS + SVG?
- aaronblohowiak 2y ago
  not sure what you mean, but htmx might be what you are looking for?
  - zekrioca 2y ago
    You are not sure what they meant, yet you think you know what they are looking for?
    - Buttons840 2y ago
      I am not sure this dice will roll less than six, but I think it will.
      - zekrioca 2y ago
        I am not sure what you meant, but I am sure there is a function with an infinite number of possibilities that it is really relatable to something.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

Ban React and other bloated js "frameworks" and watch in awe how the emissions go down.

PikachuEXE 2y ago

Sustainability: The Tyranny of the 21st Century https://newdiscourses.com/2021/10/sustainability-tyranny-21st-century/ https://newdiscourses.com/2021/10/sustainability-tyranny-21s... Sustainability is going to be the buzzword of the century. Everywhere we turn, we hear about sustainable practices in business and industry, sustainable foods and agriculture, sustainable energy, and so on. Businesses and governments sign on to “Sustainable Development Goals,” and so civil responsibility is framed in terms of this seemingly simple idea: sustainability. What does sustainability entail, though? What informs it? In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks through Herbert Marcuse’s New Leftism of the 1960s and 1970s and explains how sustainability has become Marcuse’s “New Sensibility.” In other words, sustainability is the new way of thinking about the world so that we can have liberation, which is to say Communism. Join James in this groundbreaking episode of the New Discourses Podcast to explore this idea at its ominous roots.

zekrioca 2y ago
I’m having a hard time understanding what your problem with the “sustainability” concept is. Don’t you think that “efficiency” was the tyrant of the 20th century yet no one complains about it in the 21st century? What about “AI”? Yes, sustainability will mean different things across different domains, because for some reason people are starting to realize the consequences of their actions in the real world. What else would you expect?

kettlecorn 2y ago

I was sort of hoping that this was about sustaining the web itself and preventing things like link rot and centralization of content in non-web privately owned platforms. Still, this is important too.

webprofusion 2y ago

The most sustainable thing we could do for web capable devices is to make right to repair mandatory and include in that driver specifications required for custom software/firmware. e.g. an old iPad is now obsolete, but it may work fine it just can't connect to modern TLS and doesn't trust new root CA certs. If it was possible to updated old devices with any custom OS, many devices would continue to work instead of being disposed of.

amatecha 2y ago
Yup, I have two perfectly good iPads sitting in a drawer nearly-unusable for modern online things because Apple and the web have left them behind (and all apps that have online services are no longer functional of course). The hardware is mint, the battery is good, everything in tip-top shape, but... forced obsolescence. The actual CPU/hardware are absolutely powerful enough to perform all basic computing tasks including web browsing, but Apple would prefer I just throw these away and buy a new iPad (as if that's going to happen). It's really abhorrent to me that this borderline-godlike technology is supposed to just be... thrown away after a few years? Like, I'm going to be blunt: what the fuck?
- acomjean 2y ago
  I have an iPad that is in that state too. Hardware is fine, os can’t be updated. I wish I could jail break it or install an alternative os. It’s only useful to play the few games I have for it (most of those haven’t been upgraded to 64 bit so don’t run on new OS and hardware). It’s good hardware but I feel very much at the whim of Apple.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Yeah, it's so frustrating. There's the "opposite" problem too where old software I had is no longer on App Store, and simply cannot run on newer versions of iOS. I finally had to say goodbye to my friend's awesome photography app that applied a really nice B&W effect which was unique to that app. I'll never be able to use it again, unless I carry around an old/outdated iPhone with me.

austin-cheney 2y ago

Everyone in the comments wants to blame JavaScript for the world’s ills. That is both stupid and grossly uninformed. When you live next to a Google or Facebook data center some reality starts to set in. They easily consume most of the output of a single small urban power plant on their own. It’s nuts. I didn’t realize how nuts it is until someone explained it to me, in my part time job I work with a Houston based power company lawyer that specializes in contracts for data centers. I doubt those massive data centers are reliant on JavaScript. As for JavaScript there is a simple solution that works wonders in every other industry: licensing and liability. The code is bad because the developers that write it are shit. That’s never going to change until businesses have a financial incentive to train for competence. All the wishful thinking about less JavaScript is just more virtue signaling.

eadmund 2y ago
The client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the server-side efficiency problem is Python?
- ori_b 2y ago
  The server side efficiency problem is running advertising.
  - Drakim 2y ago
    The some of the brightest minds of our generation has been wasted on optimizing how to deliver personalized advertisements in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and the true tragedy is that they didn't have a more efficient language than JavaScript to do it.
    - austin-cheney 2y ago
      It really doesn't matter. Advertisement is the debt collection of software. Its this shit nobody wants to do. As a result these people tend to make more, be pampered, and the output is generally still garbage and the developers are still depressed. Compare that with gaming where the developers are worked to death and generally underpaid, but they love what they do and have a great time building amazing things.

righthand 2y ago

Small bundle sizes are anti-Google/Facebook/et al. Google/Facebook needs to create standards to maintain control of the web and then incentivize implementation of those features in bundles. Chrome itself has a huge resource footprint, that often mirrors the common Ruby-ism about high resource usage.

PikachuEXE 2y ago

> The Sustainable Web IG will publish the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG). This set of guidelines and associated materials were drafted by the Sustainable Web Design Community Group. The WSG explains how to design and implement digital products and services that put people and the planet first. The guidelines are best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, web workers, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers. They are in line with the Sustainable Web Manifesto and aligned with GRI Standards and the UN Sustainable Development Goals to help organizations incorporate digital products and services into broader sustainability reporting initiatives. These guidelines will enable people to better understand the Internet’s impact on sustainability reporting. This includes emissions as well as stewardship principles. Exposing the Sustainable Development Goals https://youtu.be/ZW2tkK52U-o https://youtu.be/ZW2tkK52U-o We are halfway through a plot to seize control of the world. It may seem like a conspiracy theory, but it's placed awfully prominently, and everywhere, to be such a thing. The United Nations Agenda 2030 is a sweeping program to take control of our entire world. It launched in 2015 with an ambitious "17 Goals to Transform our World" and 169 targets to hit by the year 2030. That was eight years ago, and we can get a sense of how it's going. Badly. Tyrannically. Farcically. Reading from the Agenda announcement itself, in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay introduces the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations Agenda 2030 and shows how every one of them grants the pretext to seize control over the world and all human life and activity in it. Join him to know your enemy.

deleted 2y ago

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simgt 2y ago

Blame JS all you want but the problem of sustainability is, sadly, not a technical one. Write it in Python or C if what you're doing is endlessly pushing video memes or SEO-optimized "content", that's still wasted energy. A nuclear and solar grid powered 3 tons vehicle isn't much more sustainable than an ICE one if it's still carrying 1.1 human on average.

crabbone 2y ago

What I really dislike about this article is that it uses of "Web" and "Internet" interchangeably. Both technologies have problems, but they are different. It also feels like deflecting the blame (possibly unintentionally) from Web (which is in a really bad state) towards Internet, that's kind of OK, not great not awful. I.e. blaming the Internet for being one of the greatest polluters seems disingenuous, because... what if 90% of that pollution comes from Web? So, maybe the Internet works fine, but the Web needs fixing?

cpach 2y ago

Will we really move the needle on reducing greenhouse gas emissions with advice like this…? “Since the advent of the modern web, the ability to include embedded fonts and provide a more customized experience has seen their use explode. They aren't always the most performant option (which poses emissions hazards) and come with a few issues such as Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC) / Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT) which should be addressed.” IMO, if we want reduced emissions, citizens in all countries need to tell our leaders/representatives that the monetary cost of polluting must increase, until emissions are drastically decreased – i.e. we must internalize these negative externalities. In the EU, we have the Emissions Trading System for this purpose. If we don’t demand this from our leaders, how can we expect emissions to decrease? I’m sure a group like the Sustainable Web Interest Group can come up with a bunch of nice ideas, but I’m not convinced they can solve climate change. Sure, stuff like embedded fonts might possibly increase emissions. But if W3C are advicing against their usage, where’s the data that supports this guideline? (A Pigouvian tax can be another alternative, but harder to implement in EU, since taxes here are collected on the nation-level.)

MortyWaves 2y ago
I will always maintain that browsers and maybe even the OS should ship with a set of popular and well used fonts instead of just the same five """system""" fonts. Serving Inter, Open Sans, Roboto, Lato, and the like over and over and over and over does nothing except waste electricity. This is usually the point where whataboutism strikes and people "require" conversations around what constitutes a popular font. Browsers are already full of analytics and can record this. Google Fonts serves probably billions of font requests a day, so they can record this. Have the usual Big Tech bunch agree to start shipping the top, say 100, most popular fonts in their OS and/or browsers.
- hanniabu 2y ago
  Browsers should also come packages with the most popular is libraries like jQuery, bootstrap, vue, d3, etc (not a real list, just off the top of my head)
  - 2y ago

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I would think one top sustainable idea is to state your content succintly and clearly This was nearly entirely bureaucratic bollocks, but here and there you can parse some useful information. I think. Was this written with the aid of AI? It seems having an AI that summerize all of it would be a big win.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

Here is an idea. Just get rid of all the ads and related code and infrastructure. and all the extra calls here and there for tracking and spying. That would save a shitload of required processing and network traffic.

mrweasel 2y ago
It would also get rid of a lot of terrible websites with shitty content (AI or human generated) which can only exist because of the ad revenue, saving even more resources.

octacat 2y ago

"The digital industry is responsible for 2-5% of global emissions, more than the aviation industry" - we should not count mining as a digital industry. I can optimize webpage a bit, it would totally not affect how much energy bitcoin would burn (i.e. it would burn as much as possible, unless it is not profitable). We could move AI training to some other category too. Idk, I work with erlang, we can do several million connections on a single server for lightweight processing tasks. It is highly optimized, and it is still not the number one selling point for many users.

rel_ic 2y ago

"Sustainability" is the opposite of efficiency. To be sustainable we have to consume less and stop growing. "Efficiency" just empowers us to eat the planet faster. Internalize the costs of energy as a first step. If you manage to make web fonts cost $2 per load, people will find their own ways to use less of them. If you make web fonts CHEAPER to load by making them "more efficient," then people will use MORE of them!

mediumsmart 2y ago

have they found the e-bacteria that eats content garbage? god speed me hearties.

etiennebausson 2y ago

It is interesting how the pollution & energy consumption situation evolve parallel to offline society. I will nominate AI for the role of 'Big Oil'.

nonameiguess 2y ago

I guess the death of web search is finally hitting me, too, as I can't find anything that looks like a reliable source, but blog spam market research seems to claim anywhere from 60% to 90% of all web traffic is streaming video. Something to keep in mind for everyone who wants to blame JavaScript and advertising. With hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding, plus localized edge caching, this traffic is probably as efficient as it will ever get already, and the only way to cut energy usage would be to reverse the content explosion and consumer addiction. Given current trends, that seems unlikely. If anything, with LLMs that can do both CGI and storycrafting, it will get even less efficient as content is generated rather than serving stored files.

SnoozingBoa 2y ago

I am interested if someone has written a document/post/article that approaches ”web needs simplification” in current context in holistic manner. E.g. Considering energy consumption, development costs, tooling complexity, state of web standards, private and public industry domain needs etc. I personally see different problems in many of the areas, but I’d like to know if someone has already organised these topics.

throw7 2y ago

Do they include crypto as part of their "digital industry" pollution metric? I mean it's all warm & fuzzy to want leaner, more efficient websites, but there ain't nothing like cranking hashes 24/7 @100%cpus.

robertlagrant 2y ago

It would be good to have an actual accounting that isn't just the cost of the Web. The Web also provides massive benefits environmentally. People drive / travel less because of online events, e.g. gaming, online services, e.g. banking, and remote work. Offices use much less paper than they used to. Power-hungry radio transmitters are replaced by lightweight bytes on a wire. I'd love to know the net effect of all of that. And the "digital industry" in the first paragraph: is that everything digital globally, including crypto? Or is it just the stuff this WIG can address, i.e. the Web?