"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.
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.
Well...to your intended purpose. They're often better aligned with the purpose of keeping the business running.
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'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.
So it’s not only the resources needed by page, but that older devices end up in landfills.
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...