The mission of the W3C Sustainable Web Interest Group is to improve digital sustainability so that the Web works better for all people and the planet. We are developing Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) to provide actionable recommendations to ensure the web is an environmentally sustainable platform.
This month we celebrate the UN Climate Week and NY Climate Week so it is a good time to highlight W3C’s contributions to People, Planet, and Prosperity.
Practical guidelines for digital products and services
The Sustainable Web Interest Group has been honing the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), a set of practical guidelines that addresses the impacts of digital products and services. The guidelines will remain ever-evolving, but keen watchers will see the progress made through the middle of 2026.
The guidelines were created by a number of task forces, each responsible for creating a section of the guidelines. Assembling outputs from these groups highlighted some inconsistencies. The assembled guidelines were subjected to a comprehensive editorial overhaul, led by Alex Dawson and Rose Newell. This work concentrated on making sure the guidelines were specific and clear for the reader, as well as aligning the styles and ensuring grammatical and technical accuracy. The result is a set of uniform guidelines that appear to have been written by the same hand. This increases reader understanding of the guidelines as a whole.
Assigning relative impacts to web sustainability guidelines
The Interest Group (IG) also offers the Web Sustainability Guidelines Impact Ratings (WSG-IR), edited by Fershad Irani, Alex, and Rose. The group recognized that not all guidelines are created equal, but that this wasn’t clear from the way they were recorded. For example, using sustainable hosting is likely to have a much bigger impact than including machine-readable metadata, but in the main guidelines they have equal prominence. The impact ratings assign relative impacts to each guideline in terms of People, Planet, and Prosperity, all with reference to the time frame they apply in. These ratings help readers building sustainable web products prioritize which guidelines to aim for in the event of a tradeoff.
The latest release reflects that the document has been reviewed for accessibility, internationalization, security and privacy. This represents a major milestone for the group and clears the way for the WSGs to progress through standardization.
The IG is working to get the guidelines in the hands of real users to gather their feedback. There is a survey open for Sustainability Practitioners to gather input. We’ll incorporate feedback into the document and re-edit with a focus on readability and usability. We plan to extend our charter for 6 months and are soliciting input for our next charter.
How you can help
Please take the survey and get involved with the group. We invite you to support W3C and our work to foster a more ethical, humane, and inclusive web.