81–90 of 121 posts
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!
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…
The client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the server-side efficiency problem is Python?
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…
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.
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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)
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 goi…
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.
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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?
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.
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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?
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…
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).
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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?
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 r…
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.