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 far less watts and potentially reducing many tons of e-waste globally.
I'm skimming the linked Web Sustainability Guidelines. It's pretty much the normal stuff HN-types have been banging on about in every thread on webdev for the last decade or two. I don't really see how this will change anything.
Now it can carry a weight similar to WCAG levels, which means that product managers and customers might pay more attention to these requirements, especially if they like ticking boxes.
"Our new update means we reach WGAC 2 Level AA to > 90% and WSG to 60%, next release we aim to reach WSG to >70%" might be something we hear next year.
Do you really think the same news organizations that send the user 4mb worth of cross origin Javascript just to show 6kb of text is really gonna back track like that?
Yes. I live and work with this and I think it will help. It's not going to be quick, or a silver bullet, but very few problems in this world have quick and easy solutions.
I think the web really needs some "decluttering". The ratio of processing power by useful payload nowadays is unsustainable.
I completely agree. However, I think browsers are also to blame in some part.
On web sites that I build, I sometimes get alerts from Safari that my page is bogging down the computer and it offers to "reduce protections" to make the page perform better. But this is always on pages that are plain HTML and CSS, and don't even have animations. No Javascript. No canvas. Not even forms. And the total payload is often less than 20K.
I don't know what else I can do to make it lighter.
> 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
I'm still running the original iPhone SE from 2016, and there are basically two things that will reliably heat up the phone and absolutely destroy the battery: news websites, and the github web frontend.
It's pathetic how many resources these things use when their main job is to essentially display some text to you. The github native app works completely fine which shows it's not a problem with the phone, it's a problem with devs not caring at all about performance.
Reading this and replying on a 2014 IPad Air. About 70% of the sites I goto work just fine. Oddly, about 1/2 of GitHub works. Old.reddit works, FB is horribly broke. So it’s clearly a resource thing. The more complicated the Javascript, the worse things run.
So it’s not only the resources needed by page, but that older devices end up in landfills.
RSS is a pretty good way around this. Disabling JavaScript is also a good option to cut down on the silliness. If it breaks the site, it was probably not worth reading.
> 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...
It's simple, and for context I made both upgrades scenarios:
8gb -> 32gb: yeah, it feels a bit snappier, I can finally load multiple VMs and a ton of containers. Which rarely happens..
8mb -> 32mb: Wow! I can finally play Age of Empires 2 and blue screen crashes dropped by half!
This. In the past few decades we changed completely how we are supposed to live. Our bodies and brains evolved and adapted through thousands and thousands of years. With plenty of outdoor activity, sunlight, bonding in close communities, quiet time to exercise creativity and arts, and specially, the lack of continuous stimuli and artificially induced anxiety and stress of modern world.
> In the past few decades we changed completely how we are supposed to live... outdoor activity, sunlight, bonding in close communities, quiet time
It's more like 100 years for this division.
> continuous stimuli and artificially induced anxiety and stress of modern world
Is anxiety artificial?
400k years ago, humanity emerges. 40k years ago we finish raping and murdering the last of our close ancestors off the face of the earth (Neandertals and Densovians). It's not like we settled down after that. What are the founding stories for Rome: one brother kills another then go one town over a kidnap some wives (rape of the sabine women).
I picked Rome because the Pax Romana was 200 years of peace. ON the back of mass professionalized violence (the Legion). It wasnt exactly a time of ease and abundance out side the select few.
The last dual in America was less than 200 years ago.
2 generations ago you were lucky to make it out of a major war... the ones we have had since have been mild and voluntary.
We live in a time of abundance, ease, and calm in comparison to history.
No bears are going to eat us. No one is going to come in and burn the village down. We're not worried about starving. Or war... the "plague" was a bit upsetting but in the grand scheme of things it didn't kill a lot of us.
Are we supposed to be anxious and stressed for real reasons, are we programed to be that way, and are now freaking out over minor things because we have gotten rid of all the major ones?
Good point! I even think if the anxiety of being observed by a feral animal is the same, psychological and physiological speaking, of being summoned to the director office or waiting for the result of an exam. We live in a much better world today. Maybe our bears, lions and bandits look different now.
> 2 generations ago you were lucky to make it out of a major war... the ones we have had since have been mild and voluntary.
That's only true if you're talking specifically about US-involved wars, from the US side of things. For a lot of people, the Iraq War (for instance) was neither mild nor voluntary.
Strong point I should have made the US/western nature of my comment far more clear.
To expand on what you're saying I think many of people who have lived through those wars would look at our "western" complaints of stress and anxiety as abject nonsense. And thats not to be dismissive of what people "feel" were built in to be hyper on guard based on history.
I have a corollary to this: a lot of people in tech, who are great at their shitty office job, they all have some terrible job in their path that they will happily tell you they never want to go back to.
It looks like windows is just a store for Microsoft products nowadays. While having the majority of the OEM devices with windows, MS are really pushing their services and subscriptions on the users. And they do it the M$ way,the most annoying and mischievous way. Personally, I have one laptop with Win11 pro, for playing a couple of games. The pro edition should be for professionals, right? Nope, it's the same annoying and intrusive experience as the home edition. Screw it. I have other laptop with Pop_OS, a world of difference. My work laptop has Mac OS, and I'm really surprised how apple is so much less intrusive and annoying than Microsoft. Don't have an Apple ID? No problem, you can use your PC, we are not asking/begging every 3 days to create one. You aren't using any apple apps? Sure, you can install and use what you want, we will not cry and appeal to your emotional side. Wait? You installing Google chrome? Go ahead, just install like another app. Just change the default browser, with no questions, just 2 clicks. That simple. Windows looks like the android version of Chinese brands, full of ads and preloaded with bloatware, really.
