alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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...
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.