Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed • Hacker News Board

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#101

Post by nonameiguess » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 3:20 PM UTC

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#102

Post by SnoozingBoa » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#103

Post by troupo » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #89

troupo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - 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…

> 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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#104

Post by throw7 » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 3:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#105

Post by endorphine » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 4:47 PM UTC

zekrioca wrote: post #43

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…

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.

Can you expand on that? What's the main issue?

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#106

Post by prox » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 5:26 PM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #82

eadmund wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The client-side efficiency problem is JavaScript; perhaps the server-side efficiency problem is Python?

The server side efficiency problem is running advertising.

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#107

Post by graypegg » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

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…

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...

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#108

Post by fuzzy2 » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 5:35 PM UTC

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #88

fuzzy2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#109

Post by CuriousCosmic » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 6:05 PM UTC

fuzzy2 wrote: post #108

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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,…

> 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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#110

Post by robertlagrant » Fri, Nov 08, 2024, 6:10 PM UTC

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?