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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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