Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed | Hacker News Reader

Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

w3.org

215 pointsagumonkey113 comments

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.

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?

not sure what you mean, but htmx might be what you are looking for?

You are not sure what they meant, yet you think you know what they are looking for?

I am not sure this dice will roll less than six, but I think it will.

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.

astro is a modern framework "optimised for content heavy websites" i.e. vanilla assets mostly except when asked for something more.

[1] https://astro.build/

You can compile almost any language to JS or WASM.

As to HTML + CSS: it goes other way around: HTML and CSS (or rather its subsets) are being integrated into "normal languages", like Qt, Java. I'm not sure I ever saw any technology that could serve as a replacement for HTML + CSS. May be Eclipse RAP or Blazor? But they are so heavy that React will look like a butterfly and they're not aiming to replace HTML/CSS but rather just use it as output medium for their UI.

> As to HTML + CSS: it goes other way around...

Yeah that kind of stuff is closer but most of those types of frameworks seem to lean heavily on mapping to JS because they try to be turing complete rather than just being easy to work with DSLs.

Reasons:

- Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS

- All browser APIs are exposed through JS only

- You can't manipulate DOM except through JS

- You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating DOM. If you target Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU, you'd have to first create your entire graphics lib + flourish + font handling and rendering + accessibility + ... from scratch. And load all that on every page load

- Any language compiling into WASM would still need JS-integration for any of the above. Including Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU

- Any language without JS and DOM semantics will need to account for that (e.g. GC on DOM nodes)

- Any language compiling to WASM would need to load its runtime to actually run (including any libs). See network tab for any such project. e.g. Blazor

> - Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS

I'm not looking for browsers to talk with any language. I'm looking for some DSL that directly maps to the 3 layout languages that browsers understand (i.e. HTML + CSS + SVG). Not anything turing complete at runtime but rather a sane way of describing a webpage layout with fancy styling, UI elements, transitions, and animations but without dealing with the pain that comes with actually writing in the native browser layout languages.

> You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating DOM.

There is a lot of web flourish you can do without manipulating the DOM. It's not actually terribly unperformant to do but writing that code (mostly HTML + CSS, occasionally SVG) feels like peeling your eyelids with an unwashed lemon zester.

> ...

And for the rest of that, again I'm not looking for anything that actually executes in the browser. Just a sane, modern layout language that compiles down to static HTML and CSS with no JS or WASM (unless you explicitly ask for it).

The web spec is so complex because it serves different masters. You either making a web page, a web app, or some hybrid of the two. And there’s different constraints for each. And you will have to choose which subset to target if you were the one building that modern language.

Yep. Again, I'm not looking for a perfect global solution.

Just some domain specific language for writing sane low-to-no-js web pages or parts of web pages without having to manually fiddle with HTML or CSS in any real amount.

Static site generators honestly get me a lot of the way there but those are unfortunately template based which means any significant customisation requires dealing with the HTML and CSS rather than being able to just describe the layout and behavior I want.

Honestly I'd just write the compiler/lang myself if I didn't hate frontend so much.

> Just a sane, modern layout language that compiles down to static HTML and CSS with no JS or WASM (unless you explicitly ask for it).

Depends on what you mean by sane modern layout :)

Many modern layouts are still impossible without a lot of JS intervention. Many web flourishes also require Javascript :)

That's why there are no DSLs for this: HTML and CSS already are the DSLs you're looking for.

Sounds like you might be looking for a Static Site Generator. Astro was already mentioned. There's plenty of others, mostly geared towards blogs. I also had success with docfx and MkDocs, both for project documentation.

Yep. I'm well versed with static site generators but every one I've ever worked with has been heavily template based rather than being an actual layout engine that map onto HTML+CSS+SVG. i.e. They all require you to still write in HTML+CSS+SVG rather than being a generalised way of writing HTML+CSS+SVG without dealing with the warts of those languages.

I don't entirely get what you mean by "layout engine". A WYSIWYG editor perhaps? Or maybe a canvas like Microsoft OneNote, where you can draw and put text boxes? Or a word processor? Why isn't the usual Markdown (or the like) approach enough?

My gut feeling is that you cannot (fully) abstract away HTML/CSS if you want the result to feel like an actual website.

With Astro, MkDocs or docfx, I do not have to touch HTML, except maybe for creating the master layout and/or transformation rules, if needed.

> Why isn't the usual Markdown (or the like) approach enough?

Because you can't use markdown to design CSS or SVG animations. I want to be able to design an animation with code that describes how the elements move/interact and then compile that down into CSS or SVG keyframes so that I don't have to manually declare however many arbitrarily complex keyframes.

I understand the purpose of a static site generator and I'm not looking for anything to replace that. Rather I want to be able to write the templates for my static sites without 1. writing exceptionally tedious HTML & CSS and without 2. relying on client side JS to do those tedious things.

I think HTML+CSS is already a pretty good layout engine, so people don't really bother. In fact I think it's so good it's used even when it really shouldn't be, like with Electron applications.

There are. It is not necessary faster/more optimized approach.

One should not confuse energy-efficiency with sustainability. Yes, pushing simpler frameworks to its limits is good, but it is not the main issue, nor it is enough given the exponential growth in demand that we have been witnessing.

Can you expand on that? What's the main issue?

I tend to disagree, in the same way that it is better to use higher efficiency class dishwasher or washing machines it is better to use code that achieves the same with less computing power. Saying that the increase in energy demand through reason x does not mean that efficiency efforts are in vain.

HE washers have been known to fail more quickly, are more complex and expensive to repair, and not do as good of a job as the machines they replaced, so I don't think that's a good analogy.

Not sure why JS is the problem though. You can use JS in small doses to drastically improve the user experience on websites. The fact that heavy frameworks are sometimes used in contexts where they are overkill is not strictly JS' fault. By that logic you would also need to go down the rabbit hole of what compilers produce efficient programs on the server side and ban everything else.

I think the tools we have nowadays are perfectly fine. It's a matter of how they are used. And I am pretty sure efficiency is not what companies think of when they launch a product.

Languages, language tools, language communities and language reputations are kinda inseparable.

You can write Java without using incredibly huge class, function, and variable names. You don't have to apply complex design patterns everywhere, or use a complicated framework you barely understand. You don't have to write code that produces 50-line stack traces. I don't have to import a dozen dependencies each with a dozen dependencies of their own, creating an endless security update treadmill. You don't have to write code that needs a gigabyte of RAM for the smallest microservice. Problems like long garbage collection pauses can be solved.

But if I take a job writing Java software? Probably I'm going to be handed a codebase written the way most Java developers write Java code. And I'd better make peace with that, or find a different job.

I agree. Sometimes the best you can do to cope with the sprawling ecosystems around programming languages and having to deal with convoluted codebases and inefficient programs, is sit down at home and building something simple (if you can spare the time and energy). That is what I do every now and then and it is incredibly satisfying to be able to explore how therapeutic programming can be when you are not boxed in.

I think this is not how companies work though, because they do not operate based on your views alone. And getting all people to agree on some of the topics you mentioned (e.g. importing dependencies vs. rolling your own implementations) is an incredibly complex task.

How do you define absolutely necessary? Shitty JS frameworks written by incompetent people are absolutely necessary to the revenue of advertising media.

We had banner ads back then too, without the JS.

> 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.

Yes, it doesn't have to be that time frame, but it would be a good reference point. Early 2000s allowed us to do most of what we can now, there are certainly exceptions, but the average website would be no worse. The savings in processing and memory consumption can then either be used to run other things, or extend the usable lifetime of a device. There's no reason why we could not use the same device for 10 or more years, again with some specialised exceptions.

Give that this is specifically a w3.org SIG, I'd suggest doing a LTS web standard, something like 10 - 15 years. Make it have a reduced feature set in terms of Javascript and CSS. For some businesses it would be attractive to know that a solution developed to a specific standard which would mean compatibility across devices and software for 10 years (ideally more, 10 years isn't that long). Newer devices would consume less power and older devices would require less frequent replacement.

The problem is that this would need to find it's way into a browser, which would also need a long term supported and stable operating system, to gain all the benefits.

Just to play devils advocate for a minute: I live in Montréal Québec Canada, and the power entering my home is almost certainly generated at a hydroelectric dam. [0] There is an ecological impact from damming rivers, but in terms of GHG emissions, it's drastically better environmentally compared to coal or natural gas electricity generation systems.

If the service I'm using is hosted on us-east-1, it's using power from virginia, which uses a mix of natural gas and nuclear. [1]

Based on that... is running more logic on my computer or on an edge server within Québec, actually using less GHG-emitting energy than running it on the origin server?

[0] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Virg...

The fact that you entirely ignore the biggest plague of the web, i.e. ads and analytics and all taboola garbage and autoplaying videos and audios, taking more energy than that once a year election pie chart makes me think that you are missing the forest for the tree. Also, even if I were to try picking up React today and make a most garbage pie chart on a page visited by whole population of America, it would still be dwarfed by the amount of energy wasted by watching a tiktok video on same number of devices.

> 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

JS crypto miners working overtime. Will allow CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc. to stay in business for another 4 years.

(Along with Ozempic ads, which are basically completely unnecessary now.)

>and push it to its limits.

HTMX. Or basically we need some JS framework like HTMX / Alpine.js where we could test what to include in HTML.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I think that it will make it easier for people to justify efforts they already want to do. And that’s something, I guess.

That cross-orign JavaScript is their revenue.

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.

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.

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.

Do you have any examples? I believe you, but I've literally never seen this before. Is this desktop or mobile Safari?

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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-vit...

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.

The client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the server-side efficiency problem is Python?

The server side efficiency problem is running advertising.

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.

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.

It’s funny you mention this, because I just visited space.com for the black hole article (no adblocker on this device) and I could feel the device becoming warm and literally lost 3% on my battery level.

Well, Google does a lot more than Web... so, it's hard to tell what you are seeing in those datacenters. It could be that specifically next to where you live is a GCP datacenter or whatever other division in Google that has nothing to do with Web (Google has its fingers in cyber-security, television, maps, cellular phones, general electronics, ML and much, much more...)

So, measuring their power consumption isn't going to indicate anything unless you know what exactly does that datacenter support.

Facebook. Its estimated at 22 million sqft.

It's the same thing honestly. Facebook has a boatload of projects that have nothing to do with Web. They probably spend more on their ML stuff than any other department in terms of infrastructure / resources.

At one point I ran across the statistic that said that Facebook's internal network had more IP addresses than the entire public Internet. Maybe whoever claimed that exaggerated, but all the Web stuff Facebook has to offer doesn't need even a single percent of IP addresses of the entire Internet.

Also, as far as I know, Facebook has its own h/w ambitions. It builds its own h/w and equips its own datacenters with it. While this is definitely not their main business, h/w development is a lot more resource-intensive than s/w development when it comes to datcenter usage (when it's about developing datacenter h/w).

That completely misses the point. The point is about lowering electricity consumption.

For Web...

If the datacenter in question isn't involved in Web at all, why would it be of any interest how much power it consumes?

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.)

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.

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)

Already possible: https://www.localcdn.org/

That's an extension

That's an implementation detail. Several parts of Firefox and Chrome are implemented internally as extensions.

We already have CDNs so one site downloading a version of a library works for all. Maybe content-addressible dependencies could make that even better, for cross-CDN support?

No it doesn’t, CDNs now very specifically are not able to download it for all sites like they used to. Chrome saw to this.

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.

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?

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.

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.

— “The leanternet principles” <https://leanternet.com/>

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

Also:

— “Sustainable Web Design” <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/>

— “Low Tech – a solar-powered website” <https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/>

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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...)

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

God forbid if people are paid to work on something.

"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!

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.

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.

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)

You probably get the same result in the end, but yt-dlp can also do this if you point it at the m3u8 file.

(Actually I just checked and it also supports downloading Twitter videos directly.)

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

It is interesting how the pollution & energy consumption situation evolve parallel to offline society.

I will nominate AI for the role of 'Big Oil'.

> 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

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.

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?

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/ [2] https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com

> 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/ including EU and US Department of Justice https://www.ada.gov/resources/2024-03-08-web-rule/

> 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.

There's a group in my neighborhood that adopts public sector projects and runs them all from a small cluster that they operate.

I keep thinking they would do better if they got ahead of things and suggested a toolchain for future projects, that would increase the odds that they get adopted.

Getting a few groups of volunteers together to learn a handful of LTS technology stacks instead of a cartesian product of all of them that grabbed two people's fancy three years ago and now they're bored/out of money. It would make it a lot easier to get to a more PBS-adjacent model of internet for the public good.

In some respects this is a different sort of sustainable than what they mention in the article, but amortizing a bunch of relatively low-pop services across a single cluster and admin team still counts as an efficiency, versus having them scattered on disparate hardware, disappear from neglect, to be recreated again in a few years from scratch, after someone squats the old URL and refuses to give it back.

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

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

Sustainability: The Tyranny of the 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.

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?

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...

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?

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")

Probably suggesting that cloud storage and cloud server products use energy less efficiently than a more simple setup

That's certainly untrue. They have much more flexible choice of where to put their datacenters.

I'm confused by this comment and the accompanying link. This is a wiki page that was created in 2013 and hasn't been touched since. It contains no recommendations, just some random thoughts that look like they were written spur of the moment and then forgotten about.

Oh, and it starts with a giant disclaimer that says "This Wiki page is edited by participants of the RDWG. It does not necessarily represent consensus and it may have incorrect information or information that is not supported by other Working Group participants, WAI, or W3C. It may also have some very useful information."

Do you have anything else to point to to suggest that the W3C is "pushing us all since 2013" towards 3 cloud providers?

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