[HN Gopher] Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed
___________________________________________________________________
Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed
Author : agumonkey
Score : 204 points
Date : 2024-11-07 19:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
| tsobral wrote:
| 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.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| 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.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Now it can carry a weight similar to WCAG levels, which means
| that product managers and customers might pay more attention
| to these requirements, especially if they like ticking boxes.
|
| "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.
| zelon88 wrote:
| Do you really think the same news organizations that send
| the user 4mb worth of cross origin Javascript just to show
| 6kb of text is really gonna back track like that?
| solarkraft wrote:
| I think that it will make it easier for people to justify
| efforts they already want to do. And that's something, I
| guess.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That cross-orign JavaScript is their revenue.
| Y-bar wrote:
| Yes. I live and work with this and I think it will help.
| It's not going to be quick, or a silver bullet, but very
| few problems in this world have quick and easy solutions.
| compressedgas wrote:
| I looked to see what those guidelines had. It has nothing
| about pages actually having contents if JavaScript isn't ran
| or CSS isn't supported.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Do you have any examples? I believe you, but I've literally
| never seen this before. Is this desktop or mobile Safari?
| cle wrote:
| > 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.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| > 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.
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Reading this and replying on a 2014 IPad Air. About 70% of
| the sites I goto work just fine. Oddly, about 1/2 of GitHub
| works. Old.reddit works, FB is horribly broke. So it's
| clearly a resource thing. The more complicated the
| Javascript, the worse things run.
|
| So it's not only the resources needed by page, but that older
| devices end up in landfills.
| kreims wrote:
| 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.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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...
| Theodores wrote:
| 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.
| longtimelistnr wrote:
| Twitter regularly changes the location of source videos because
| as X they now charge for the ability to download them directly.
| I've also noticed on iOS, if you attempt to screen record a
| video the app essentially crashes or glitches the video player.
| rozap wrote:
| As with many things, the solution is ffmpeg. After I got that
| upsell thing when I tried to download a video about a week
| ago, I found the correct ffmpeg incantation, mostly out of
| spite for Twitter. If you find the m3u8 request in devtools
| on a tweet, you can use something like the following:
| ffmpeg -i 'https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1846357395959
| 615488/pu/pl/ecNx-sTzYA9doHYO.m3u8' -analyzeduration 5G
| -codec:a libmp3lame -b:a 96k output.mp4
|
| (if anyone runs that command...you're welcome for the meme,
| unfortunately I don't know where it came from)
| neckro23 wrote:
| You probably get the same result in the end, but yt-dlp can
| also do this if you point it at the m3u8 file.
|
| (Actually I just checked and it also supports downloading
| Twitter videos directly.)
| Y-bar wrote:
| 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...)
| zelon88 wrote:
| 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...
| nox101 wrote:
| Are you suggesting we'd use less energy and materials if we
| stored things on physical media and when we needed to share
| something we send a physical copy via snail-mail or courier?
| mihaaly wrote:
| I believe he suggest to establish a chain of smoke signal
| towers transmitting the bits of our holiday photos to our
| distant relatives. During the day and when there is no wind
| of course.
|
| 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")
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Probably suggesting that cloud storage and cloud server
| products use energy less efficiently than a more simple setup
| astrange wrote:
| That's certainly untrue. They have much more flexible
| choice of where to put their datacenters.
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm confused by this comment and the accompanying link. This is
| a wiki page that was _created_ in 2013 and hasn 't been touched
| since. It contains no recommendations, just some random
| thoughts that look like they were written spur of the moment
| and then forgotten about.
|
| 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?
| vegadw wrote:
| 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
| Y-bar wrote:
| > 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/
| kokanee wrote:
| > 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| crabmusket wrote:
| > 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?
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://sgmljs.net/blog/blog2303.html
| bitpush wrote:
| God forbid if people are paid to work on something.
| palsecam wrote:
| Related:
|
| -- "The leanternet principles" <https://leanternet.com/>
|
| -- "The 250KB Club - The Web Is Doom" <https://250kb.club/>
| culi wrote:
| Also:
|
| -- "Sustainable Web Design" <https://sustainablewebdesign.org/>
|
| -- "Other 'clubs'": no-js.club, 1mb.club, 512kb.club,
| 250kb.club, 10kbclub.com, 1kb.club, js1k.com, js1024.fun
|
| -- "CSS Minecraft - written in 100% HTML/CSS with 0 javascript"
| <https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/>
|
| -- "Low Tech - a solar-powered website"
| <https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/>
| tatarin wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| 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.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| 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?
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| not sure what you mean, but htmx might be what you are
| looking for?
| zekrioca wrote:
| You are not sure what they meant, yet you think you know
| what they are looking for?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I am not sure this dice will roll less than six, but I
| think it will.
| zekrioca wrote:
| I am not sure what you meant, but I am sure there is a
| function with an infinite number of possibilities that it
| is really relatable to something.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| astro is a modern framework "optimised for content heavy
| websites" i.e. vanilla assets mostly except when asked for
| something more.
|
| [1] https://astro.build/
| vbezhenar wrote:
| You can compile almost any language to JS or WASM.
|
| As to HTML + CSS: it goes other way around: HTML and CSS (or
| rather its subsets) are being integrated into "normal
| languages", like Qt, Java. I'm not sure I ever saw any
| technology that could serve as a replacement for HTML + CSS.
| May be Eclipse RAP or Blazor? But they are so heavy that
| React will look like a butterfly and they're not aiming to
| replace HTML/CSS but rather just use it as output medium for
| their UI.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > As to HTML + CSS: it goes other way around...
|
| Yeah that kind of stuff is closer but most of those types
| of frameworks seem to lean heavily on mapping to JS because
| they try to be turing complete rather than just being easy
| to work with DSLs.
| troupo wrote:
| Reasons:
|
| - Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS
|
| - All browser APIs are exposed through JS only
|
| - You can't manipulate DOM except through JS
|
| - You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating DOM.
| If you target Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU, you'd have to first create
| your entire graphics lib + flourish + font handling and
| rendering + accessibility + ... from scratch. And load all
| that on every page load
|
| - Any language compiling into WASM would still need JS-
| integration for any of the above. Including
| Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU
|
| - Any language without JS and DOM semantics will need to
| account for that (e.g. GC on DOM nodes)
|
| - Any language compiling to WASM would need to load its
| runtime to actually run (including any libs). See network tab
| for any such project. e.g. Blazor
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > - Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS
|
| I'm not looking for browsers to talk with any language. I'm
| looking for some DSL that directly maps to the 3 layout
| languages that browsers understand (i.e. HTML + CSS + SVG).
| Not anything turing complete at runtime but rather a sane
| way of describing a webpage layout with fancy styling, UI
| elements, transitions, and animations but without dealing
| with the pain that comes with actually writing in the
| native browser layout languages.
|
| > You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating
| DOM.
|
| There is a lot of web flourish you can do without
| manipulating the DOM. It's not actually terribly
| unperformant to do but writing that code (mostly HTML +
| CSS, occasionally SVG) feels like peeling your eyelids with
| an unwashed lemon zester.
|
| > ...
|
| And for the rest of that, again I'm not looking for
| anything that actually executes in the browser. Just a
| sane, modern layout language that compiles down to static
| HTML and CSS with no JS or WASM (unless you explicitly ask
| for it).
| skydhash wrote:
| The web spec is so complex because it serves different
| masters. You either making a web page, a web app, or some
| hybrid of the two. And there's different constraints for
| each. And you will have to choose which subset to target
| if you were the one building that modern language.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Yep. Again, I'm not looking for a perfect global
| solution.
|
| Just some domain specific language for writing sane low-
| to-no-js web pages or parts of web pages without having
| to manually fiddle with HTML or CSS in any real amount.
|
| Static site generators honestly get me a lot of the way
| there but those are unfortunately template based which
| means any significant customisation requires dealing with
| the HTML and CSS rather than being able to just describe
| the layout and behavior I want.
|
| Honestly I'd just write the compiler/lang myself if I
| didn't hate frontend so much.
| troupo wrote:
| > Just a sane, modern layout language that compiles down
| to static HTML and CSS with no JS or WASM (unless you
| explicitly ask for it).
|
| Depends on what you mean by sane modern layout :)
|
| Many modern layouts are still impossible without a lot of
| JS intervention. Many web flourishes also require
| Javascript :)
|
| That's why there are no DSLs for this: HTML and CSS
| already are the DSLs you're looking for.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Sounds like you might be looking for a Static Site Generator.
| Astro was already mentioned. There's plenty of others, mostly
| geared towards blogs. I also had success with docfx and
| MkDocs, both for project documentation.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Yep. I'm well versed with static site generators but every
| one I've ever worked with has been heavily template based
| rather than being an actual layout engine that map onto
| HTML+CSS+SVG. i.e. They all require you to still write in
| HTML+CSS+SVG rather than being a generalised way of writing
| HTML+CSS+SVG without dealing with the warts of those
| languages.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| I don't entirely get what you mean by "layout engine". A
| WYSIWYG editor perhaps? Or maybe a canvas like Microsoft
| OneNote, where you can draw and put text boxes? Or a word
| processor? Why isn't the usual Markdown (or the like)
| approach enough?
|
| My gut feeling is that you cannot (fully) abstract away
| HTML/CSS if you want the result to feel like an actual
| website.
|
| With Astro, MkDocs or docfx, I do not have to touch HTML,
| except maybe for creating the master layout and/or
| transformation rules, if needed.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| > Why isn't the usual Markdown (or the like) approach
| enough?
|
| Because you can't use markdown to design CSS or SVG
| animations. I want to be able to design an animation with
| code that describes how the elements move/interact and
| then compile that down into CSS or SVG keyframes so that
| I don't have to manually declare however many arbitrarily
| complex keyframes.
|
| I understand the purpose of a static site generator and
| I'm not looking for anything to replace that. Rather I
| want to be able to write the templates for my static
| sites without 1. writing exceptionally tedious HTML & CSS
| and without 2. relying on client side JS to do those
| tedious things.
| consteval wrote:
| I think HTML+CSS is already a pretty good layout engine,
| so people don't really bother. In fact I think it's so
| good it's used even when it really shouldn't be, like
| with Electron applications.
| octacat wrote:
| There are. It is not necessary faster/more optimized
| approach.
| zekrioca wrote:
| 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.
| endorphine wrote:
| Can you expand on that? What's the main issue?
| seb1204 wrote:
| I tend to disagree, in the same way that it is better to use
| higher efficiency class dishwasher or washing machines it is
| better to use code that achieves the same with less computing
| power. Saying that the increase in energy demand through
| reason x does not mean that efficiency efforts are in vain.
| karmarepellent wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| Languages, language tools, language communities and language
| reputations are kinda inseparable.
|
| You _can_ write Java without using incredibly huge class,
| function, and variable names. You don 't _have_ to apply
| complex design patterns everywhere, or use a complicated
| framework you barely understand. You don 't _have_ to write
| code that produces 50-line stack traces. I don 't _have_ to
| import a dozen dependencies each with a dozen dependencies of
| their own, creating an endless security update treadmill. You
| don 't _have_ to write code that needs a gigabyte of RAM for
| the smallest microservice. Problems like long garbage
| collection pauses _can_ be solved.
|
| But if I take a job writing Java software? Probably I'm going
| to be handed a codebase written the way most Java developers
| write Java code. And I'd better make peace with that, or find
| a different job.
| karmarepellent wrote:
| I agree. Sometimes the best you can do to cope with the
| sprawling ecosystems around programming languages and
| having to deal with convoluted codebases and inefficient
| programs, is sit down at home and building something simple
| (if you can spare the time and energy). That is what I do
| every now and then and it is incredibly satisfying to be
| able to explore how therapeutic programming can be when you
| are not boxed in.
|
| I think this is not how companies work though, because they
| do not operate based on your views alone. And getting all
| people to agree on some of the topics you mentioned (e.g.
| importing dependencies vs. rolling your own
| implementations) is an incredibly complex task.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| How do you define absolutely necessary? Shitty JS frameworks
| written by incompetent people are absolutely necessary to the
| revenue of advertising media.
| userbinator wrote:
| We had banner ads back then too, without the JS.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > 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.
| graypegg wrote:
| Just to play devils advocate for a minute: I live in Montreal
| Quebec 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 Quebec, 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...
| n_ary wrote:
| 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.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Ban React and other bloated js "frameworks" and watch in awe how
| the emissions go down.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| 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.
| zekrioca wrote:
| I'm having a hard time understanding what your problem with the
| "sustainability" concept is. Don't you think that "efficiency"
| was the tyrant of the 20th century yet no one complains about
| it in the 21st century? What about "AI"?
|
| Yes, sustainability will mean different things across different
| domains, because for some reason people are starting to realize
| the consequences of their actions in the real world. What else
| would you expect?
| kettlecorn wrote:
| 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.
| webprofusion wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yup, I have two perfectly good iPads sitting in a drawer
| nearly-unusable for modern online things because Apple and the
| web have left them behind (and all apps that have online
| services are no longer functional of course). The hardware is
| mint, the battery is good, everything in tip-top shape, but...
| forced obsolescence. The actual CPU/hardware are absolutely
| powerful enough to perform all basic computing tasks including
| web browsing, but Apple would prefer I just throw these away
| and buy a new iPad (as if that's going to happen). It's really
| abhorrent to me that this borderline-godlike technology is
| supposed to just be... thrown away after a few years? Like, I'm
| going to be blunt: what the fuck?
| acomjean wrote:
| I have an iPad that is in that state too. Hardware is fine,
| os can't be updated.
|
| I wish I could jail break it or install an alternative os.
| It's only useful to play the few games I have for it (most of
| those haven't been upgraded to 64 bit so don't run on new OS
| and hardware). It's good hardware but I feel very much at the
| whim of Apple.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, it's so frustrating. There's the "opposite" problem
| too where old software I had is no longer on App Store, and
| simply cannot run on newer versions of iOS. I finally had
| to say goodbye to my friend's awesome photography app that
| applied a really nice B&W effect which was unique to that
| app. I'll never be able to use it again, unless I carry
| around an old/outdated iPhone with me.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| 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.
| eadmund wrote:
| The client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the
| server-side efficiency problem is Python?
| ori_b wrote:
| The server side efficiency problem is running advertising.
| Drakim wrote:
| The some of the brightest minds of our generation has been
| wasted on optimizing how to deliver personalized
| advertisements in front of as many eyeballs as possible,
| and the true tragedy is that they didn't have a more
| efficient language than JavaScript to do it.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| It really doesn't matter. Advertisement is the debt
| collection of software. Its this shit nobody wants to do.
| As a result these people tend to make more, be pampered,
| and the output is generally still garbage and the
| developers are still depressed. Compare that with gaming
| where the developers are worked to death and generally
| underpaid, but they love what they do and have a great
| time building amazing things.
| prox wrote:
| It's funny you mention this, because I just visited
| space.com for the black hole article (no adblocker on this
| device) and I could feel the device becoming warm and
| literally lost 3% on my battery level.
| crabbone wrote:
| Well, Google does a lot more than Web... so, it's hard to tell
| what you are seeing in those datacenters. It could be that
| specifically next to where you live is a GCP datacenter or
| whatever other division in Google that has nothing to do with
| Web (Google has its fingers in cyber-security, television,
| maps, cellular phones, general electronics, ML and much, much
| more...)
|
| So, measuring their power consumption isn't going to indicate
| anything unless you know what exactly does that datacenter
| support.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Facebook. Its estimated at 22 million sqft.
| crabbone wrote:
| It's the same thing honestly. Facebook has a boatload of
| projects that have nothing to do with Web. They probably
| spend more on their ML stuff than any other department in
| terms of infrastructure / resources.
|
| At one point I ran across the statistic that said that
| Facebook's internal network had more IP addresses than the
| entire public Internet. Maybe whoever claimed that
| exaggerated, but all the Web stuff Facebook has to offer
| doesn't need even a single percent of IP addresses of the
| entire Internet.
|
| Also, as far as I know, Facebook has its own h/w ambitions.
| It builds its own h/w and equips its own datacenters with
| it. While this is definitely not their main business, h/w
| development is _a lot_ more resource-intensive than s /w
| development when it comes to datcenter usage (when it's
| about developing datacenter h/w).
| austin-cheney wrote:
| That completely misses the point. The point is about
| lowering electricity consumption.
| righthand wrote:
| 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.
| PikachuEXE wrote:
| > 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
|
| https://youtu.be/ZW2tkK52U-o
|
| 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.
| simgt wrote:
| 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.
| crabbone wrote:
| 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?
| cpach wrote:
| 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.)
| MortyWaves wrote:
| I will always maintain that browsers and maybe even the OS
| should ship with a set of popular and well used fonts instead
| of just the same five """system""" fonts. Serving Inter, Open
| Sans, Roboto, Lato, and the like over and over and over and
| over does nothing except waste electricity.
|
| This is usually the point where whataboutism strikes and people
| "require" conversations around what constitutes a popular font.
| Browsers are already full of analytics and can record this.
| Google Fonts serves probably billions of font requests a day,
| so they can record this.
|
| Have the usual Big Tech bunch agree to start shipping the top,
| say 100, most popular fonts in their OS and/or browsers.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Browsers should also come packages with the most popular is
| libraries like jQuery, bootstrap, vue, d3, etc (not a real
| list, just off the top of my head)
| ahoka wrote:
| Already possible: https://www.localcdn.org/
| hanniabu wrote:
| That's an extension
| robertlagrant wrote:
| We already have CDNs so one site downloading a version of a
| library works for all. Maybe content-addressible
| dependencies could make that even better, for cross-CDN
| support?
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It would also get rid of a lot of terrible websites with shitty
| content (AI or human generated) which can only exist because of
| the ad revenue, saving even more resources.
| octacat wrote:
| "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.
| rel_ic wrote:
| "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!
| mediumsmart wrote:
| have they found the e-bacteria that eats content garbage? god
| speed me hearties.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| It is interesting how the pollution & energy consumption
| situation evolve parallel to offline society.
|
| I will nominate AI for the role of 'Big Oil'.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| SnoozingBoa wrote:
| 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.
| throw7 wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| 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?
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