alt Hacker NewsWhat, 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
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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.
> 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.
> 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/