The current discussion around website energy use and sustainability, alongside my own experiences of how little companies care about accessibility and digital privacy, has had me thinking about how all of us, as developers, can have a positive impact on the web. I feel a little that, while many of us are fighting this battle individually, it would be far better if we could all combine our forces together to make the web a better place.
My current attempt at that is to create a sort of manifesto for a better web, a set of guiding principles for building a better world wide web together. The current list of principles are 3:
- Respect the privacy of your users.
- Minimise your impact on infrastructure and the environment.
- Make your content accessible for all.
I’ve put up a simple website (https://www.better-web-alliance.net/) to try and raise awareness about this and to (hopefully) get other developers on board to discuss the actions that we can all take.
The website currently lists these principles, alongside a short piece of text on why they matter. It also aims to provide a list of articles and tools that cover improving performance, accessibility and privacy on websites
My main hope for this is to get all of us talking about the direction we would like the web to go in and what we can do as developers to help it get there. Nothing is set in stone and I'm expecting the project to evolve as more people hopefully get involved and express their opinions.
Any feedback from anyone would be most appreciated; is this the right way to go about doing things? are there other areas I've missed that you think are important? are there trade-offs to making the kind of changes I'm suggesting? are there some other fantastic resources that you would like added to the site?
Hopefully this provides some food for thought.
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