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Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

w3.org

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Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#61

Post by troupo »

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?

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

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#62

Post by troupo »

tsobral wrote: post #3

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 fa…

> 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...

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#63

Post by fuzzy2 »

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?

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#64

Post by amatecha »

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 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?

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#65

Post by PikachuEXE »

> 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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#66

Post by eadmund »

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…

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

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#67

Post by michaelt »

karmarepellent wrote: post #54
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…

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 nowada…

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#69

Post by simgt »

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.

Re: Sustainable Web Interest Group Is Formed

#70

Post by karmarepellent »

michaelt wrote: post #67
karmarepellent wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nowada…

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 doz…

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.

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