- From: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
- Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2019 12:20:28 +0100
- To: public-sustyweb@w3.org
On 12/06/2019 09:03, Chris Adams wrote: > > I wanted to flag this up in case anyone else had missed it. The W3C > recently published their Ethical web principles, and they explicitly > mentioned sustainability in them: > > /The web must be an environmentally sustainable platform > > The web, as a whole, is a big consumer of power. New web > technologies should not make this situation worse. We will consider > power consumption when we introduce new technologies to the web./ > > > You can see the full list here: > Web designers are trained as commercial artists, not as engineers. I can't see them understanding or considering energy efficiency. In fact, I see the opposite, with the continuing bloat of web sites, and one of my pet hates, the increasing sending of unsolicited video streams. My concern with video streams relates more to volume charges, but those volume charges reflect network capacity, and therefore infrastructure operating costs. I'm actually charged more in working hours, and whilst that may not seem energy use related, in fact it is as the excess charge reflects the high peak loading on my ISP. They have to size their infrastructure, and probably power it, based on the peak usage. Although there may be tactics to mitigate power usage in quiet times, a lot of resources go into building the infrastructure and these do reflect peak loading. Another recent development is that caching has become almost impossible which means every access uses resources on the whole path to the web site. (This is because of encrypting everything, although the lack of engineers in web design also means that caching was unnecessarily defeated even before then.) I can probably think of lots of other examples where there are incentives on web designers to squander energy, especially as a significant part of the cost is paid for by the consumer, not the supplier.
Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2019 11:21:25 UTC