Sustainable web development

At the most recent State of the Browser (a conference I attended and about which I've been meaning to write since I got on the train back north), Henri Helvetica delivered a talk called In Commission to No Emission, about the impact that the Internet—and specifically ballooning resource sizes—has on the environment.

His message was that by adopting progressive web standards—like new efficient image formats, progressive enhancement with minimal JavaScript, and static generation—we can minimise the impact that our websites have on the environment. I think that his advice to cut images from your website was maybe a little bit zealous, but it was funny to watch folks in the room proceed to take pictures of him onstage and post them to Twitter en masse.

A couple of other projects worth mentioning in the same breath:

• SustyWP is a project aiming to deliver a full WordPress project in as little data as possible (7KB for the full page + styling!).
• This website from Low-Tech Magazine runs on solar power, and goes offline during periods of bad weather—talk about low impact.

Web hosting powered by sustainable sources is also pretty generally available at this point, although the search engine ranking page has been optimised within an inch of its life.