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Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

w3.org

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Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#71

Post by crabbone »

austin-cheney wrote: post #59

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 pow…

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#72

Post by crabbone »

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?

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#73

Post by cpach »

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.)

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#74

Post by ThinkBeat »

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#76

Post by MortyWaves »

cpach wrote: post #73

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…

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#77

Post by acomjean »

amatecha wrote: post #64
webprofusion wrote: post #52

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 be…

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 inclu…

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#78

Post by hanniabu »

MortyWaves wrote: post #76
cpach wrote: post #73

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…

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. Brows…

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)

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#79

Post by octacat »

"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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#80

Post by octacat »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #42
userbinator wrote: post #35

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…

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?

There are. It is not necessary faster/more optimized approach.
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