Shaping Web Sustainability with the W3C

Environment Variables

In this episode of Environment Variables, host Chris Adams dives into the evolving landscape of sustainable web development with Alexander Dawson and Tzviya Siegman from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Dawson and Siegman discuss the W3C’s efforts to develop Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), a comprehensive set of evidence-based practices aimed at reducing the environmental impact of web technologies. They explore the creation and potential impact of these guidelines, especially as global interest grows in embedding sustainable practices within web standards. The episode also covers the challenges of driving adoption across public and private sectors, the role of testability in sustainability guidelines, and future directions for standards that minimize digital carbon footprints. This engaging conversation provides listeners with insights into how W3C’s sustainability initiatives could shape the future of the web.

Learn more about our people:

• Chris Adams: LinkedIn | GitHub | Website
• Tzviya Siegman: LinkedIn | Website
• Alexander Dawson: Website

Find out more about the GSF:

• The Green Software Foundation Website
• Sign up to the Green Software Foundation Newsletter

Resources:

• The Week in Green Software: Greening Web Standards at the W3C w/ Alex Dawson and Anne Faubry [04:20]
• Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 [04:56]
• GRI [16:36]
• RDF-star Working Group [19:26]
• General policy framework for the ecodesign of digital services version 2024 [21:34]
• Sustainable Web Design Community Group [31:04]
• Sustainable Web | Interest Groups | Discover W3C groups | W3C [31:06]
• The 2024 Web Almanac [33:40]

If you enjoyed this episode then please either:

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  Follow, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts
• Follow and rate on Spotify
• Watch our videos on The Green Software Foundation YouTube Channel!

Connect with us on Twitter, Github and LinkedIn!
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Alexander Dawson: We have tried to, even at the point of being a community group,

treated this as seriously as possible and made sure what we've created to be as evidence led as possible.

Chris Adams: Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, brought to you by the Green Software Foundation. In each episode, we discuss the latest news and events surrounding green software. On our show, you can expect candid conversations with top experts in their field who have a passion for how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of software. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Hello, and welcome to Environment Variables, where we bring you the latest news and insights from the world of sustainable software development. I'm your host, Chris Adams. Green software covers a lot of different kinds of software. And today, we're checking in on the work of a group of fellow travelers in the world of web development, and more specifically, the World Wide Web Consortium. If you're not familiar with the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, it's effectively the place where people who build the web define how the web works. And where standards like HTML works, how CSS works, and how they're made accessible, and so on. And long before the Green Software Foundation existed, there was the W3C Sustainable Web Design Community Group, chaired by Tim Frick at the agency Mighty Bytes, who was also the author of the O'Reilly book, Designing for Web Sustainability. And in the last few years, there's been a real uptick in activity in this group, with the creation of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines and regular monthly community calls to coordinate the work on developing more sustainable web development practices. So what exactly are the Web Sustainability Guidelines and who are they for? If you cared about sustainability in the digital realm, why would you try getting involved in a group like the W3C in the first place? How does this even change the way people build the web and consume web services? And how do we make them more sustainable? Joining us today are two key figures from the W3C to help us explore these themes. Alex Dawson, one of the editors of the Web Sustainability Guidelines at the W3C, and Tzviya Siegman, at the W3C's new sustainability lead. So in alphabetical order, Alex, you win here. So I'm just going to hand over to you to briefly introduce yourself before we hand over to Tzviya. Is that okay?

Alexander Dawson: Yep, that's fine. Hi, everyone. I'm Alex Dawson, and I'm an invited expert in the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group. And as Chris has mentioned, I'm the editor of the Web Sustainability Guidelines. And I've also recently been involved in co-authoring the upcoming sustainability chapter in this year's Web Almanac.

Chris Adams: Cool. Thanks for that, Alex. Tzviya, can I give you the floor to do the same?

Cool.

Tzviya Siegman: Sure. Thank you for having me. I'm Tzviya Siegman. I'm the sustainability leader at W3C. I recently joined the staff of W3C, but I've been involved here more than 10 years. I also do member engagement in North America. I recently been involved in setting up the interest group in W3C and getting used to being on the staff instead of being a member.

Chris Adams: Thanks, Tzviya. And if you're new to this podcast, my name is Chris Adams. I am the host of this podcast, but I'm also the executive director at the Green Web Foundation. I also work Inside the Green Software Foundation as one of the chairs of the policy working group as well. And I'm one of the maintainers of the library CO2.js, a tool that's used in a number of digital sustainability projects. Before we dive into this conversation, here's a quick reminder that we're going to share a transcript to this and links to all the projects that are just mentioned in our show notes. And, you'll need to look for that on podcast.greensoftware.foundation to find that. So if you're listening to this via Spotify or YouTube, you might not find them. So please remember to look that up there. Alright, so, with that, I think the two of you are sitting comfortably, right? Alex, maybe I'll just hand over to you. So, last time, around about this time last year, I believe you joined us with Anne Faubry, and you spoke to us about the second draft of the Web Sustainability Guidelines. And most recently, I saw you presenting at the Green IO London conference about, again, web sustainability, and specifically the process of making these guidelines for people to follow. So, as I understand it, you're now at, is it draft 8, or possibly draft 9? So, I'd like to ask a little bit about how they get built, but before we do that, could you just give a brief summary of what the Web Sustainability Guidelines are to the uninitiated?

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. Essentially, the Web Sustainability Guidelines are an evidence-based set of advisory guidelines. Many people may be aware of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as our founding principles of accessibility. And we've kind of followed a similar set of principles, but designing and creating them for the sustainability community.

And they've been in development for about three years now. And obviously, They are to assist those who want to make digital products and services more sustainable through practical techniques. And obviously, the science is developing rapidly as is the sustainability field and of course, legislative compliance targets.

So it's a much needed feature that the web really requires. And, it's a sort of Global growing focus as climate change is becoming a ever more important topic of discussion.

Chris Adams: Cool, thanks. Alright, there's two forlorn questions I might ask. So, first of all, you spoke about the Web Sustainability Guidelines. That's quite a mouthful. Is it okay to call them like the WSGs? Is there a short term that we should use for that?

Alexander Dawson: Yep, WSGs is perfectly fine. We use WSG as our sort acronym.

Chris Adams: Got it, okay. So I use WSG, a bit like the kind of web content accessibility guidelines, or sometimes the WCAG, right? I'll call it. So WCAG and WSG. Got it. Okay. And also, I know that you're at Green.io, the conference, it's like one of the places to be going to if you're going to speak about digital sustainability. How was that? How did you find it?

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, it was amazing, really. I mean, you were there yourself. It was definitely the place to be. It was sort of like the Woodstock of sustainability, pretty much. Anyone and everyone who could be there managed to sort of cram in the place, standing remotely at the back of the conference room. There were sort of all the faces from all these sort of major players that could sort of get there.

Yeah, it was a pretty amazing event. all credit to sort of Gail and getting sort of everybody involved in the conference. It was pretty much the event of the year as far as digital sustainability goes.

Chris Adams: So, you enjoyed that.

Alexander Dawson: Definitely, yeah.

Chris Adams: All right, okay, and Tzviya, if I hand over to you, as I understand it, you work the W3C, and you're the new sustainability lead, and part of your day job is essentially guiding the existing community group that created some of these guidelines. But there's also work to create a more formal, I think they're called interest groups, which is slightly different. We'll explore that a little bit later on. Before we do that, can I just backtrack to talk about how you ended up working as a sustainability lead in the W3C? Because I had no idea there was one until I heard about your involvement in this. And honestly, I was quite pleased because it's been something inside the W3Cs like, architectural guidelines, their TAG, they said the web should be sustainable.

And now they've actually got someone who's talking about this. So that was really nice to hear. So yeah, how'd you get into this? What's the story that this came about?

Tzviya Siegman: I'll give you a short history of my career. I started working in standards back in 2008. I worked for a publishing company, and I was doing the digital side of things, looking at XML, and all of a sudden, ebooks became the thing. And it was, "oh my goodness, Tzviya, we need somebody to work on this." And we created a hundred based on PDF and CR, and I was like, this doesn't really look right, maybe I can fix it. And I did. In order to fix it, you need to read standards. And the whole ebook program came under my leadership, and I was not very high up in the food chain at that point. Eventually, I started working on the standards with an organization called the International Digital Publishing Forum. Because that's where EPUB was at the time. And over the next six years, the IDPF merged with the W3C. And I became the chair of the publishing working group. And then I joined the W3C's advisory board. And then I became chair of the advisory board. And etc. And then I got laid off. And I worked with some people within the W3C to develop this role because I have become interested in sustainability. All along I've been working in accessibility, and the part of technology that's always really interested me is not necessarily creating faster products. That's, time to market was always intimidatingly working with the product managers and things like that. At my job in publishing, I was always frustrated when project issues like accessibility got thrown to the side because there was a new feature game developed. It's nice to have a new feature, but if it's not accessible, if he doesn't have pride, then we were, yeah. And so sustainability is in that area as well. I used to work on what a manager, a former manager of mine called the illities. Accessibility, sustainability, and now I'm still, this is living the dream for me. So, I was able to sculpt this job with the W3C, which is really a dream for me. And the fact that sustainability is mentioned in the W3C's vision, I'll take a little credit for that, because I was one of the people who wrote that. So, just a little credit, because there were a lot of people involved in writing that. But here we are, and we are really excited to be working on sustainability in an interest group, which you mentioned is not quite the same as the working group, because some of the differences now or later that we're working on a specification would, I can explain the different types of specifications, but I'm really excited to be leading the community group into something more formal than just a new file, even though we had a lot of uptake, where we were able to form a policy and an interest group to be through soon.

Thank you.

Chris Adams: I see, okay, so it sounds like this is not your first rodeo. You've been through the process of seeing how standards get developed, and this is why you being involved with this helps, because there may be a bunch of people who have, who might be curious about this and have all the things you kind of wish for, but you've seen how this works, you've seen how the sausage gets made, and that's, some of your role is to help steer some of that through so we end up with something that people actually can use and adopt in their work and things like that, then.

Tzviya Siegman: Yeah, absolutely. The work in W3C, when it's an interest group or a working group, it goes through a pretty rigorous process, and I can talk about that process in more detail in the literature.

Chris Adams: Thanks! Alright, okay, thanks for that, Tzviya. So hopefully we've caught up the audience to where we are today, November 2024. We spoke a little bit about the history. And I teased about the creation of this new group, like an interest group that has some more formal backing within the W3C. So for people who are not au fait with how web standards are formed, or what an interest group is compared to a community group, can you maybe just explain a little bit about why this is a big deal and what it makes possible that wasn't before?

Tzviya, I'll hand over to you, then maybe Alex will come in with some specific examples, because he was the author of the guidelines.

Tzviya Siegman: Yeah, thank you. I'll talk a little bit about what it is that we try to accomplish with standards and what that means in W3C. In W3C, standards require interoperable implementations. Interoperable is achieved by testable implementations where we test things to make sure that they work in at least two instances. Sometimes standards are codified by regulatory bodies. We see this with something like USBC in the EU. We also see this with WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines being pointed to by various legislation. There are a lot of standards. Like WCAG, where this is pointed to, and the W3C, we have community groups, so anybody can start a community group, it doesn't have the formal structure of a W3C group, it's people get together, they work on things, and it's the incubation process, we call it, or just people get together because they need

Chris Adams: Okay.

Tzviya Siegman: An interest group is, has the authorization of the W3C's advisory committee. Everybody has to vote on the work. A member of each W3C member organization has the ability to vote yes or no or maybe. Yes, but I would like to see this then changed on the formation of an interest group. And an interest group can write statements. A working group is when the same came with the advisory committee, but they actually have the recommendation track, which is what W3C officially calls standards. The sustainability group is an interest group where they write in statements. Because the Web Sustainability Guidelines include a lot of things that are not necessarily testable. Although there are a lot of testable statements in there, and I'll turn it over to Alex to talk about how we'll proceed with that.

Chris Adams: Okay, thanks for that, Tzviya. So if I just paraphrase that for people, there's almost like an escalating layer of authority or formality that comes through this. And it may be that the bar is somewhat higher with the things that get published by an interest group compared to a community group. And like there's an escalating scale all the way up to having like full blown standards.

And this is like the midway point. And, like, Alex, if that's about right, I'll hand over to you, Alex, and maybe you can chime in on some of it, because, yeah, you are very hands on when writing some of these, perhaps.

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, obviously, we are trying to be as rigorous as possible because throughout the creation process, we have tried to, even at the point of being a community group, treated this as seriously as possible and made sure what we've created to be as evidence led as possible. And we are still in the process of trying to create as much measurability data as we can, which is something that we are going to be increasingly focused upon as an interest group.

So, with regards to testability, which is something that obviously interest groups, having testable implementations, it's not something that we have to be as strict upon, we still want to make sure our work is as rigorous and testable as possible. Because there may come a point in the future that we may want to have that testable compliance state for working what we have created in with legislative conformance and being able to do so may require at some point, obviously in the far future, taking our work from an interest group state to a working group state to get that recommendation status.

But that is something, in the far off distant future, as Veer will probably nod and agree with. But for the moment, obviously, we want to focus on making what we have created as rigorous as possible purely because anyone who is going to utilize our work, we want to have the best quality evidence for anything we are submitting as guidance.

We want to be able to. tell people using our work, this is the best way that you can implement something in your product or service because the evidence shows that this will have the greatest impact in terms of sustainability. And it's something that we've been very much focused upon when creating the Web Sustainability Guidelines from the offset, which is why we've got so many references within our work.

We've got quite a lot of material relating to things like GRI and such. So it's something that we've been very much focused upon from the offset.

Chris Adams: Okay, and by GRI, you're referring to the Global Reporting Initiative here, right?

So that's one of the other groups that talk about, okay, this is how you, set out what counts as sustainable, for example, and they've done a bunch of work that you're referring to with that one there.

Alexander Dawson: Yeah. It's one of the measures that we've been utilizing alongside obviously academic material and many other forms of tooling as well.

Chris Adams: Alright, thanks for that, Alex. So, I'd just like maybe touch on that a little bit more, because one thing that I know that we've seen, like, in France, for example, there are something like guidelines which are kind of mandated for government websites now, and it sounds like you might be looking for something like that on a more international scale that could be adopted in other parts of the world, and I mean, for folks who are new to this, the W3C has, like, a public mailing list, and if you look on there, you'll see, like, there are people from, say, I think, Singapore. The government of Singapore basically said, "hey, we're looking for some standards like this, or something for us to adopt," and I know there are people in other parts of the world who are basically saying, "I want to push for this, but I need some kind of something either like a standard or a set of guidelines I can ask my team to be following," and it sounds like that's the kind of push, because I know the WSGs have been in some kind of usable form now, but it feels like this seems to be a real push for adoption to get larger organizations to use them, who commissioned significant projects. And we spoke about how these might not be standards with a capital S, there might be a kind of guidance for sustainable software, but in terms of providing a reasonable expectation of what you can expect a responsible practitioner to do, that seems to be what they'd be shooting for.

So maybe we could talk a little bit about what adoption looks like here, and maybe we can hear some stories about organizations expressing interest in adopting these and what that process looks like, because, yeah, this is a new field, and I know that we've just spoken about how different places are looking for this. And Alex, I suspect you've been in some of these conversations, so maybe if I hand over to you, and then maybe let Tzviya chime in, because she's seen this happen a few times outside of just sustainability.

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, in terms of adoption, meeting the success criteria is rather open to interpretation at this point. I mean, we're, as I've mentioned, we're aiming to improve measurability data as an interest group, so we can better sort of lead by evidence. Regarding if a particular technique has a greater impact or not and that's sort of on the horizon.

Currently we sort of follow a similar practice to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with their accessibility techniques and much of that can be seen with, in our STAR supplement, Sustainable Tooling and Reporting, as that outlines optional techniques that are currently deemed, where appropriate, machine testable, so can be sort of repeated and used to showcase which success criteria can be repeatable and, implementable to meet certain success criteria within the particular guidelines.

Now, obviously, you don't have to follow them, they're not sort of gospel, and we're working to sort of improve them where we can along the pathway. But we've been sort of trying to improve upon this to sort of help people in terms of general adoption. And regarding sort of interest from the public and private sector, we've had quite a lot of interest definitely from various organizations.

I mean, I have been sort of trying to keep track wherever possible, and there have been a number of agencies globally where they mentioned that they have been starting to utilize and implement our work and there have been a lot of government departments who have got in touch who are openly interested in utilizing what we have created, even though it's in draft format, or have interest in actually for tracking our progress or getting on board with what we've created potentially for what could be future compliance, so it's good signs and sort of generally good feeling, if nothing else, that we're potentially on the right track with what we have been creating.

Chris Adams: Okay, all right, so if I understand that correctly, so I spoke about how France has, they've set up some standards themselves already. So like, "all our websites made by the public sector have to meet these standards." In other parts of the world, there might be people saying, "well, we're going to set some of this, and rather than write all this stuff ourselves, we'll refer to these things as like, we'll defer to that, as that's what we're going to hold as our bar that everything needs to meet," for example.

That's what some of this stuff is. It seems to be like the direction that's heading in. Okay, so that gives you some idea of how that might work. But, Tzviya, I am, I'll hand over to you because, obviously, it's a bit more complicated than that. And like, there's, we can ask for certain things, but that's not the same as people actually adopting this stuff for example. Like, if it was, well, we would see a probably more accessible web, for example. So, Tzviya, can I hand over to you to talk a little bit about, like, actually adoption and how this happens, or if there's any things that you've learned over the last few years that you might share that could help here?

Tzviya Siegman: So, adoption is a really complicated topic. Something that I think many people find shocking when they start looking at standards is that we can write standards in an incredibly idealistic way. But we can't actually make anybody use them. It's very frustrating. This is why the implementation tests were important. But even with testing, we can't promise adoption. And that's why it's important for everybody working on this to become evangelists. And I often say that my job is really evangelism, and a lot of people who have worked at, who are working on sustainability come from the world of accessibility because the role is very similar in terms of evangelism. And it's really important to make sure that the set of issues is a high priority. People who are working on browsers, servers, and in their organizations, like you might have an HR department who has a goal of, let's say, reducing carbon emissions, because that's what everybody says, because as Tim Frick likes to say, they have carbon tunnel vision. They'll say they're reducing carbon by 30 percent by 2030, so just pick a number. They don't know what that means. We need to get to the developers who are actually writing the code, and we need to get to the people who are building the servers, and so on. So that They can actually do the work because the people at HR or the CEO or whoever it is who's making these commitments don't have the tools to do this. Our guidelines give us some of the tools and the guidelines are divided into sections so that this touches a lot of different departments in an organization, and we're trying to break them down so that people can pull out the different sections that are relevant to them, but that adoption step is really important. I'll also say that what you were talking about, Chris, where different governments might be able to point to the guidelines, that's really where adoption is important. But it also comes down to being able to educate people, and we're also going to be working on different education materials. I love WCAG, I'm a big fan, but a lot of people are deeply critical of WCAG because it's so hard to understand. So we're trying to make ours a lot easier to understand, and hopefully we'll be able to be really successful with it.

Chris Adams: Okay, thanks for that, Tzviya. So, you, so there's two things that kind of came out of that. So, one of them was about, Alex, you spoke about these things being testable. And presumably, this is some of the stuff that you might see when people are using, say, web page tests, which has, like, Carbon control, or EcoGrid, or some of these things. If you can test for something, then you can provide some guidance as part of the analysis process, or you can automate this and check, like, has this got better or has it got worse? That's what some of the kind of sustainability things presumably would afford, right? And that's what you're kind of referring to with some of that.

And that might be something that you're essentially able to, like, enforce a standard on, or make sure it's meeting the standard that you've set out in some kind of agreement, right?

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. If we can provide something that's testable or something that people can utilize, then it's something that toolmakers, people creating products and services, can implement with what they're creating. And that will obviously help us do our job because for people creating tools like, Website Carbon, Ecograder, they can filter that down into their processes so that rather than individuals having to read an extensive specification, with a few clicks of a button, it can provide feedback through reports, potentially tools that can be integrated within IDEs like Visual Studio Code, things that could be integrated within browsers such as the DevTools environments within, say, Google Chrome and Firefox and such. Lighthouse Project is a prime example.

These are things that if it's machine testable, it can be integrated within tooling and that will help take a lot of the friction out of people being able to quickly identify where the problems are occurring, how much of a problem it is, and how to identify what resolution needs to be,

Chris Adams: kind of remedial action you might take. All right, okay, thanks for that. Okay, so that helps summarize that, and Tzviya, you were talking a little bit about, okay, different groups might have different stakeholders, and you were referring to public sector as one group that might have legally binding targets.

For example, we know that in the UK, they have a target to reduce emissions by however much, and in Europe, it's reduced emissions by 55 percent by the end of, wow, in five and a half years time, for example, I mean, I'm speaking to you in the middle of an election, so there's a difference about, but like, up until yesterday, there was a whole thing about the federal government being the single biggest purchaser of green energy, which was forcing a kind of switch to cleaner energy, for example, things like that.

That seems to be what you're referring to, right?

Tzviya Siegman: Yeah, there's public and private, but there's also different stakeholders, such as product managers versus developers. Individuals within an organization.

Chris Adams: Ah, I see, so like when you've got product managers, if they know what to ask for, they're able to, that helps inform that conversation with the team they're working with and say, "can we please agree to meet these standards or have something like that." They don't need to be the specialists themselves to know that if there's a standard or set of guidelines out there, that at least gives a shared set of minimum standards that the work's going to be run at, basically.

Tzviya Siegman: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. That provides a bit more guidance about, I guess, the theory of change behind some of this. So, we're just starting to come up to time, and I wondered if we might be able to look forward to, like, what's on the horizon in the world of sustainable web development, and if there's anything that you folks have, that maybe, if I was to ask you, What should be on an interested listener's radar if they were interested in web sustainability? If I hand over to you, Alex, first, and then over to you, Tzviya, is there anything, like, what should people be looking out for between now and the end of the year, for example, or perhaps in Q1 2025? What's on your list, Alex?

Alexander Dawson: I think the thing that's dominating everybody's discussion at the moment is just sort of AI, isn't it, really? Everyone's talking about it, it's causing a lot of discussions around sort of how big an impact it's going to have, and it's pretty much going to be the dominating discussion around, how we're going to sort of wrangle around it in terms of legislation and measurements and tolling and Optimization and such, so I think that's going to be a major sort of domineering factor, especially considering how much infrastructure it's currently absorbing in terms of building new facilities and such, so yeah.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. And are there any particular projects or things that you're expecting to, any releases by projects you follow, or any big things like that you would direct people to? So, they've been listening to this and they might want to find like a follow on link or follow on project to look into. What would you direct people to if they found something that's interesting but wouldn't want to go somewhere else next?

Alexander Dawson: There's not a particular one especially that I've been following. I mean, if I find any useful links or materials, normally it gets sucked straight into our project into the Web Sustainability Guidelines because we have nicely organized references for any useful material that can help people make decisions and such.

So I always like to point people to the guidelines, to the latest release, because I, nicely guard in those links and keep them up to date with all the latest material relating to sustainability. We've got sort of about 1500 odd links, all nicely categorized for people interested in sustainability.

Yeah, it's probably the largest digital sustainability reference library on the web.

Chris Adams: Blimey. Okay. All right. And, Tzviya, is there anything that you might kind of direct people's attention to? Like, we've spoken all about interest groups and community groups, but like, they still run, right? Like, they happen in the, is it monthly? I mean, how, if someone wants to find out about this, what's the process like to start

getting involved in any of this stuff, for example?

Tzviya Siegman: I'll provide links for both the interest group and the community group in W3C. For the community group, you don't need to be a member. For the interest group, you need to be a member of W3C or be what's called an invitative expert, which means provide a reason that you should be invited and, like, get a review by me and the chairs of the interest group and then show that you'll do the work. Also, something I'll be working on in the next year or so is creating a horizontal review program for the W3C and sustainabilities. The W3C prides itself on doing horizontal review on all standards in the areas of accessibility, privacy, security, and internationalization, meaning, we'll say the example of accessibility, every, there's a review of every single specification to make sure that the specification itself is accessible and will introduce accessibility problems. So I have the job of creating this for sustainability.

Chris Adams: Sorry to interrupt, can I just check, because I'm not sure I'm familiar with the horizontal, is the idea there being that you've got three or four standards, and you want them to be consistent with each other? Is that what horizontal reviews, or is there something else?

Tzviya Siegman: Horizontal review means that, so, let's say you have a new CSS specification. There are dozens of those every year. There's an accessibility checklist for the people in the CSS working group to take a look at. And then we have the opportunity to speak with people who are experts in accessibility to make

Chris Adams: okay.

Tzviya Siegman: accessibility issues onto the web. So I will be working to create a sustainability horizontal review checklist. I don't know yet how I'll be doing this, but that's part of my job as sustainability lead. I'm very excited about this because this has not been done before. So we want to make sure that the W3C is not bringing new sustainability issues to the web.

Chris Adams: Oh, I see. Okay. So if I check if I understand that, and maybe this is one concrete example, I know that there are certain bits of CSS, like there are certain filters that if you run them, you can basically cook that CPU in your laptop. I think Florian at Mozilla, he's one of the people who built the Firefox profiler.

He has this kind of party trick where he basically takes you to a single web page and it triggers one thing which just cooks your machine, because it just runs all the cores really, really hard, basically, just because it's doing a kind of gentle group. It sounds like something a bit like that, like, if someone's going to introduce a feature, they're aware of some of the knock on impacts, or they might have, yeah, okay, I think I understand that now.

Tzviya Siegman: And I'm going to just remind Alex that he's working on the web almanac.

Chris Adams: Yeah,

Tzviya Siegman: And maybe you want to plug that.

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. We've got the new edition of the Web Almanac, which will be coming out this month. I've contributed to the sustainability chapter, and anyone who's interested in sustainability will be wanting to check out the results of that. So, yeah.

Chris Adams: Cool, and for people who are not familiar with the Web Almanac, this is essentially a bit like a kind of state of the web. Every year it comes out, tells everyone what's going on. So you've been saying, essentially it's state of sustainability of the web, that's what your chapter's focusing on, right?

Alexander Dawson: Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Adams: Brilliant, well if that's visible, we'll share a link to that in the show notes, but anyone who's curious, Web Almanac seems like a fairly easy term to search in your chosen search engine. Brilliant. Okay, well, I think we've got a good few pointers, and we'll also link to some of the community groups that we spoke about here. I suspect there's a conversation to have about how the GSF should work with the W3C for some of the groups there, because I know there is, we spoke about AI, and there's a GSF, Green Software Foundation Working Group, specifically focused on AI. It may make sense to do something along those lines for web specifically, because it's another clear sector and a clear application of software.

So, just before we go, maybe I should ask, if people want to find out more about you and your work, where should we, where should people be looking? Tzviya, if I start with you, like, where should we go? Is there a LinkedIn page or something like that you'd direct people to?

Tzviya Siegman: Sure, I'll drop my LinkedIn page, it's linkedin.com/Tzviya, I think. And there's also my bio on the W3C staff page, which I don't remember the URL off the top of my head, but I'll find out.

Chris Adams: Okay, cool. And Alex, for you as well?

Alexander Dawson: Mine's pretty straightforward. You can find my details on my website, and my name is my URL, so it's alexanderdawson.com.

Chris Adams: Alright, that seems nice and easy to Google and look up, and Alexander and Dawson are spelt like you would expect them to be spelt as well.

Alexander Dawson: Absolutely.

Chris Adams: Brilliant. Well, folks, thank you so much for giving us a bit of a kind of deep dive into the world of the W3C, and how web standards get made, and how we can actually, how they can be adopted, and wish you best of luck.

Hopefully I'll see you at one of the other community groups, or the meetings every month, and yeah, hope you have a nice week, alright? Take care, folks. Ta ra.

Tzviya Siegman: Thank you.

Chris Adams: Hey everyone, thanks for listening. Just a reminder to follow Environment Variables on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave a rating and review if you like what we're doing. It helps other people discover the show, and of course, we'd love to have more listeners. To find out more about the Green Software Foundation, please visit greensoftware.foundationon. That's greensoftware.foundation in any browser. Thanks again, and see you in the next episode.