How should the Web Sustainability Guidelines be organised?

The first version of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) were initially published in 2023, under the stewardship of the Web Sustainability Community Group. Since then, a charter has been established for the formation of the W3C Web Sustainability Interest Group (WSIG) in 2024, and that group has been refining and editing the WSG for the past year.

The status of the WSG is that they have gone through a thorough editing process, and the Editor’s Draft is now beginning the early stages of review and feedback from other groups in the W3C. This is an important step towards eventually releasing the next version of the WSG.

I’ve been involved in the group as an Invited Expert, but mostly my engagement has been asynchronous largely due to the timing of the regular weekly meeting. That said, all those meetings are recorded and shared on GitHub which allows me to catch up with things when I can.

One of the things that the members of the IG have been discussing over the past few months has been how to best organise the WSG. There’s a few things to note here:

There are 92 guidelines at the moment (with 254 associated success criteria).

They have a very broad scope, covering everything from design, development, through to business strategy.

The guidelines currently have a roles based organisation (UX, Web Dev, Hosting & Business).

There is a additional level of tagging for guidelines which allows for folks to apply filtering themselves.

The sheer number of guidelines makes it impractical to just put them in a single list. The broad scope also means that there are a number of guidelines at the moment which have potential overlap (something that there is an open issue to work through). Within the group, there are also reservations about the effectiveness of the role based organisation, as it might mean that people who come to the WSG for the first time don’t see a relatable role listed and bail.

Request for feedback

This all leads to the key question the WSIG is grappling with at the moment - how to organise such a varied set of guidelines to make them usefully navigable for people who are looking into web sustainability (perhaps for the first time)?

I’ve jotted down some of my thoughts in this open GitHub issue, and the topic has been discussed in detail across several WSIG meetings. Getting input from outside the group would certainly be extremely beneficial for everyone involved.

So let us know what you think. Does the current roles based approach work for you? If not, what adjustments could we make so that the guidelines are presented in a manner that are navigable, align with the world they’ll be applied in, and can help encourage broader adoption?

All ideas are welcome, and there are no wrong answers. You should be able to leave a comment on GitHub issue I’ve linked to above, or if you’d rather share stuff privately then feel free to reach out using any of the platforms I’ve listed on my /contact page. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated 🙏🏼.