Performative performance

Web Summer Camp in Croatia finished with an interesting discussion. It was labelled a town-hall meeting, but it was more like an Oxford debating club.

Two speakers had two minutes each to speak for or against a particular statement. Their stances were assigned to them so they didn’t necessarily believe what they said.

One of the propositions was something like:

In the future, sustainable design will be as important as UX or performance.

That’s a tough one to argue against! But that’s what Sophia had to do.

She actually made a fairly compelling argument. She said that real impact isn’t going to come from individual websites changing their colour schemes. Real impact is going to come from making server farms run on renewable energy. She advocated for political action to change the system rather than having the responsibility heaped on the shoulders of the individuals making websites.

It’s a fair point. Much like the concept of a personal carbon footprint started life at BP to distract from corporate responsibility, perhaps we’re going to end up navel-gazing into our individual websites when we should be collectively lobbying for real change.

It’s akin to clicktivism—thinking you’re taking action by sharing something on social media, when real action requires hassling your political representative.

I’ve definitely seen some examples of performative sustainability on websites.

For example, at the start of this particular debate at Web Summer Camp we were shown a screenshot of a municipal website that has a toggle. The toggle supposedly enables a low-carbon mode. High resolution images are removed and for some reason the colour scheme goes grayscale. But even if those measures genuinely reduced energy consumption, it’s a bit late to enact them only after the toggle has been activated. Those hi-res images have already been downloaded by then.

Defaults matter. To be truly effective, the toggle needs to work the other way. Start in low-carbon mode, and only download the hi-res images when someone specifically requests them. (Hopefully browsers will implement prefers-reduced-data soon so that we can have our sustainable cake and eat it.)

Likewise I’ve seen statistics bandied about around the energy-savings that could be made if we used dark colour schemes. I’m sure the statistics are correct, but I’d like to see them presented side-by-side with, say, the energy impact of Google Tag Manager or React or any other wasteful dependencies that impact performance invisibly.

That’s the crux. Most of the important work around energy usage on websites is invisible. It’s the work done to not add more images, more JavaScript or more web fonts.

And it’s not just performance. I feel like the more important the work, the more likely it is to be invisible: privacy, security, accessibility …those matter enormously but you can’t see when a website is secure, or accessible, or not tracking you.

I suspect this is why those areas are all frustratingly under-resourced. Why pour time and effort into something you can’t point at?

Now that I think about it, this could explain the rise of web accessibility overlays. If you do the real work of actually making a website accessible, your work will be invisible. But if you slap an overlay on your website, it looks like you’re making a statement about how much you care about accessibility (even though the overlay is total shit and does more harm than good).

I suspect there might be a similar mindset at work when it comes to interface toggles for low-carbon mode. It might make you feel good. It might make you look good. But it’s a poor substitute for making your website carbon-neutral by default.

Faster Connectivity !== Faster Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.

Amen!

Cameron Dutro on ruby.social

Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.

Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.

It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.

My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.

Defaulting on Single Page Applications (SPA)—zachleat.com

This isn’t an opinion piece. This is documentation.

You can’t JavaScript your way out of an excess-JavaScript problem.

Henry From Online | How To Make a Website

Write meaningful HTML that communicates the structure of your document before any style or additional interactivity has loaded. Write CSS carefully, reason your methodology and stick to it, and feel empowered to skip frameworks. When it comes time to write JavaScript, write not too much, make sure you know what it all does, and above all, make sure the website works without it.

The whole article is great, and really charmingly written, with some golden nuggets embedded within, like:

• You’ll find that spending more time getting HTML right reveals or even anticipates and evades accessibility issues. It’s just easier to write accessible code if it’s got semantic foundations.
• In my experience, you will almost always spend more time overriding frameworks or compromising your design to fit the opinions of a framework.
• Always style from the absolute smallest screen your content will be rendered on first, and use @media (min-width) queries to break to layouts that allow for more real estate as it becomes available.
• If your site doesn’t work without JavaScript, your site doesn’t work.
• Always progressively enhance your apps, especially when you’re fucking with something as browser-critical as page routing.

Streets Series’ Articles - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

This is a really excellent four-part series on web performance that really dives into the technical details and asks all the right questions:

1. Making the world’s fastest website, and other mistakes
2. The weirdly obscure art of Streamed HTML
3. Speed Needs Design, or: You can’t delight users you’ve annoyed
4. Routing: I’m not smart enough for a SPA