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...
