alt Hacker NewsSustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed
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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Related:
— “The leanternet principles” <https://leanternet.com/>
— “The 250KB Club - The Web Is Doom” <https://250kb.club/>
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?
"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!
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...)
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.
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.
"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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
have they found the e-bacteria that eats content garbage? god speed me hearties.
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.
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
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.
Ban React and other bloated js "frameworks" and watch in awe how the emissions go down.
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?
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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.
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...
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.