from Hacker News

Sustainable web design

by shadowfaxRodeo on 8/9/21, 10:17 AM with 48 comments

  • by mhitza on 8/9/21, 11:19 AM

    Tried the ecograder tool on my github hosted single page html just for kicks.

    It rated as not mobile friendly (even if I have separate media queries for mobile/tablet).

    It ranked negatively on MozRank (how well linked (?) it is from other websites, which I don't understand -- neither does it explains -- how it relates to eco friendliness). At least the main site itself is penalized by the same MozRank criteria.

    Seems like a tool to generate leads to Mightybyte consulting services (who developed the tool, a founding organization behind sustainable web design).

    About the manifesto I have mixed feelings, to me it feels rather "wishy washy".

    Wish them luck with the project.

    It also has the same bug I encounter often on full bleed designs where there's extra padding/margin that makes a horizontal scrollbar visible. Which reminds me that even experienced designers still don't have a good grasp on CSS /s

  • by kerblang on 8/9/21, 1:01 PM

    I was actually expecting this would have something to say about programming frameworks that abuse system resources, waste memory and peg client & server CPU, and maybe even about programmers who blame the equipment for not accommodating their abuse, and maybe even at the greatest extreme, about a tendency to blame software problems on easy corporate targets while ignoring open source accountability. Maybe going even further still to talk about software churn, framework-of-the-month rewrite-everything mentalities, and so forth.

    I mean, hey, there are things we can do besides picketing amazon for building spaceships instead of solar arrays.

  • by heurisko on 8/9/21, 11:13 AM

    The web creates emissions, but I also wonder about how much it saves, with things like video conferencing, and making physical technology obsolete (the waste of optical media, like DVDs springs to mind).

  • by conradludgate on 8/9/21, 11:34 AM

    I ran the ecograder tool on a portfolio website I'm making for my girlfriend. It suggested I embed all the images in css (massively increasing the bytes on first request...). It also suggested that I use shared libraries on CDNs like jquery hosted by google, even though browsers no longer cache cross domain due to security risks.

  • by qwerty456127 on 8/9/21, 11:15 AM

    > The internet currently produces approximately 3.8% of global carbon emissions, which are rising in line with our hunger to consume more data.

    This is not about "hunger to consume more data". Actual data doesn't take much. Needlessly inflated codebases and excessive video fidelity do.

    Most of the people could use a decades-old computer and a <1Mbit/s connection to get and send all the information they might ever be interested in if we didn't insist on using huge JavaScript libraries, fancy design and HD+ video we lived perfectly well without just a decade ago. The problem is we seemingly need ever increasing everything to keep the economy growing.

  • by abbe98 on 8/9/21, 12:27 PM

    I have tried for a while to find a web-host which can report an estimation of my environmental impact based on usage. I have not been successful and the project for which I needed this we had to go with self-hosting(which likely is less sustainable) and having to calculate this based on information from our ISP/electricity companies.

    Lot's of hosting companies including all the large clouds have marketing pages about their sustainability efforts but only an obscure, expense, and inaccessible Azure service can provide CO2 pollution estimations from ones usage...

  • by dubcanada on 8/9/21, 12:03 PM

    Does having colours on your site (such as theirs) increase energy? Should we only have black and white websites since black uses less energy on OLED/LCD?

    I am a big fan of sustainability, but this seems a little bit much.

  • by shadowfaxRodeo on 8/9/21, 11:05 AM

    Given the latest IPCC report, I thought it would be worth sharing this site about sustainable web design.

    The internet is responsible for around 5% of global carbon emissions. It's difficult to measure, and generally not visible to the public.

    The solution however is fairly simple — use less data.

    Fast, accessible websites usually produce less CO2 and we already know how to do that. Now we just need to get web developers to do it. This will require:

    - educating developers and designers - smart defaults for web developers - fostering competition - making the invisible cost of the internet visible

    This is a reletively new dicipline — so anything you have to add to the mix will have a large impact.

  • by lapinot on 8/9/21, 12:44 PM

    I'd bet a lot that non-video-streaming web browsing is a tiny bit of "tech carbon consumption". What's consuming most is probably big DCs doing various backend compute stuff and high-speed/high-bandwidth streaming (on the web and mostly out of the web, like netflix and co). Also for high-tech a very big part (in the 10s of %) of whole-life energy consumption is used at manufacture (and destruction), not during use, so a big driver of consumption is culturaly and technologicaly-induced turnover/obsolescence.

    As for the web, imho there's mostly one hard solution being static web-sites being aggressively cached in a broadcast tree (as in real offline-modes, website downloading). Just like high-speed personal transportation vs collective fixed-schedule medium-speed transportation. I'd guess internet consumption is not much dependent on distance, but speed and duplication of the transfers, that's probably a thing.

    In this kind of realm i'd be curious to see the life-cycle energy cost comparison of radio-broadcast numeric TV vs cabled broadcast. Perhaps we could use numeric radio-broadcast as a distribution channel for many-to-one websites like news and newsletter-type of big social media profiles. I hope to one day say "oh it's 4:03 i'll tune my receiver to get the local blog updates".

  • by mro_name on 8/9/21, 12:40 PM

    https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com comes quite close IMO. And: make it long-term-proof, so you can leave things as they are for decades.

  • by yreg on 8/9/21, 12:11 PM

    Interesting privacy policy:

    # Can you delete my test results?

    If you have submitted a test and do not want the results public, then we have a simple policy:

    […]

    If you have tested a public url we will not delete the results.

  • by geewee on 8/9/21, 11:57 AM

    "This page loaded in 5.8 seconds and emitted just 0.49g of CO2" - on a modern desktop. If that's fast and sustainable I don't know..

  • by mithusingh32 on 8/9/21, 12:11 PM

    I don't know if I'd put a lot trust into the ecograder. It states that my personal website is mobile optimized....I know for a fact it isn't because it's terrible on mobile (incorrect padding and margins...just haven't got around to fixing it).

  • by draaglom on 8/9/21, 12:18 PM

    The headline figure of "3.8% of global carbon emissions" is currently un-sourced - so I'm very curious to see what it includes.

    IEA claims datacenters account for 1% of electricity demand and data networks are another 1%:

    IEA (2020), Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks, IEA, Paris https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

    Now, those figures are _electricity_ not _carbon emissions_ - so perhaps the 3.8% figure includes e.g. datacenter construction emissions, or emissions related to producing servers and networking equipment?

  • by Joe8Bit on 8/9/21, 11:03 AM

    It's easy to be cynical about projects like this but it made me think about how the work I do on a day-to-day basis effects the environment in a way I didn't before, so I appreciate it!

  • by surfingdino on 8/9/21, 11:57 AM

  • by bsenftner on 8/9/21, 11:43 AM

    Interesting use of the word "Sustainable", where I would expect a topic named "sustainable web design" to be about unsustainable employment practices, and unsustainable frameworks - both of which the industry is promoting unsustainably.

  • by lexicality on 8/9/21, 11:36 AM

    I find it very weird that they have a grade for not using flash in 2021

  • by sofixa on 8/9/21, 12:16 PM

    Their calculator seems to not be working atm ( hug of death), and maybe it's described there, but anyways:

    How do they measure this? Do they have the electricity consumption and supply of each datacenter around the globe? Two DCz in Poland, one using coal energy, or another one using only renewable energies; the first one has latest gen servers and networking equipment; the second one 15 year old stuff. Which one uses less CO2?

    There can be lots of differences depending on location and specificities.

  • by pluc on 8/9/21, 12:02 PM

    Right up there with metal straws in its usefulness and impact.

  • by meerita on 8/10/21, 7:07 AM

    When I read Dieter Rams in a web design article I cannot feel anything opposite to cringe.

  • by ethbr0 on 8/9/21, 10:58 AM

    From their manifesto [0] https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com/

    > Efficient

    > The products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and material resources possible.

    Ha! Let's see how much impact this has on the current web industry.

    Development velocity vs efficiency.

    I've yet to see a shop avoid Tower of Babel stacks that increase the former, at the expense of the latter. Unless it's a backwards-compatible drop-in upgrade. And even then, it doesn't bubble high on the priority list.

    [0] Obligatory https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BwozkbmjzC4