"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.
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.
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.
ffmpeg -i 'https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1846357395959615488/pu/pl/ecNx-sTzYA9doHYO.m3u8' -analyzeduration 5G -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 96k output.mp4
> 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...
There is no alterntive between storing everything in the cloud and smoke towers.
(still, I assume not the cloud storage is the most energy intensive thingy out there - but perhaps the processing of those for whatever agenda, and else - but the w3 signals are mixed the least. Perhaps this is from some sort of common corporate script book distributed in the MBI courses, from the chapter "how to pretend being serious environmentalist", mixed with the other one "deflect inconvenient/expensive steps into the infinite future or never by forming an interest group")
Oh, and it starts with a giant disclaimer that says "This Wiki page is edited by participants of the RDWG. It does not necessarily represent consensus and it may have incorrect information or information that is not supported by other Working Group participants, WAI, or W3C. It may also have some very useful information."
Do you have anything else to point to to suggest that the W3C is "pushing us all since 2013" towards 3 cloud providers?
""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
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/
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.
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.
Was I the only one thrown momentarily by the use of "web worker" to refer to a human?
— “The leanternet principles” <https://leanternet.com/>
— “The 250KB Club - The Web Is Doom” <https://250kb.club/>
Since Manifest v3 shame there's no chance web would get any less ads. Only more. Much more.
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.
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.