Introducing the Sustainable Web Guidelines
By Łukasz Mastalerz (Climate Arc)
See also the slides.
Transcript
Hi everyone.
My name is Łukasz Mastalerz and I'm representing the Sustainable Web Design Community Group.
I understand that I have only a couple of minutes here, so I'll go straight to the content.
If it works…
We're all aware of climate crisis, which is probably the defining crisis of our times.
We all hear news about constant forest fires, floods, droughts, heat waves.
Some of us may be impacted by this directly.
We're also starting to see action, de-carbonization happening across many sectors, and we're seeing the digital sector as acting as accelerator in many of these initiatives.
What's not that well known is the fact that digital sector itself is major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Depending on how we calculate this, anywhere between 2% and 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions is attributable to digital sector.
And it's happening across the whole life cycle, starting from manufacturing of digital equipment through the use of networks, data centers, and your devices down to the process of the commissioning of these devices.
With that, and inspired by the work W3C is doing over the years around web accessibility, creating web that's accessible for everyone, Sustainable Web Design Community Group started to work in 2022 to create guidelines for web creators to make sure that their content has as small negative impact on the environment as possible.
Individuals from almost 50 organizations have been working for more than 15 months, trying to build what we would like to share at this conference.
We had people with expertise in web development, designers, environmentalists field from academia and business leaders creating what we just published a couple of days ago as the first draft.
Some of you might have seen earlier version of our work, a couple of months ago, on the previous AC meeting.
Since then, we did a number of iterations through the content of the guidelines.
We merged guidelines coming from different committees.
We formatted them into ReSpec, and just literally a couple of days ago, we published them onto W3C GitHub.
We ended up with currently 93 guidelines, along with more than 200 success criteria to help people implement these guidelines in their applications.
And the whole document is currently more than 200 pages long.
Given the fact that it's so long, I'm unlikely to be able to walk you through this document now.
But I'd like to invite you to the breakout session tomorrow.
We'll be talking about this in the afternoon.
We'll try to do deep dive into our proposed guidelines.
We'd like to hear your feedback, and we'll try to answer any questions you might be having.
Thank you for your attention.
