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Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

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Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#111

Post by n_ary »

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…

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#112

Post by amatecha »

acomjean wrote: post #77
amatecha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 I'll never be able to use it again, unless I carry around an old/outdated iPhone with me.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#113

Post by robertlagrant »

hanniabu wrote: post #78
MortyWaves wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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?

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#114

Post by seb1204 »

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.

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#115

Post by consteval »

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 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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#116

Post by musicale »

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…

> 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

JS crypto miners working overtime. Will allow CNN/MSNBC/Fox/etc. to stay in business for another 4 years.

(Along with Ozempic ads, which are basically completely unnecessary now.)

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#117

Post by userbinator »

seb1204 wrote: post #114
zekrioca wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

HE washers have been known to fail more quickly, are more complex and expensive to repair, and not do as good of a job as the machines they replaced, so I don't think that's a good analogy.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#118

Post by crabbone »

austin-cheney wrote: post #100
crabbone wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

That completely misses the point. The point is about lowering electricity consumption.

For Web...

If the datacenter in question isn't involved in Web at all, why would it be of any interest how much power it consumes?

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#120

Post by MortyWaves »

robertlagrant wrote: post #113
hanniabu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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?

No it doesn’t, CDNs now very specifically are not able to download it for all sites like they used to. Chrome saw to this.
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