Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) becomes a first public Draft Note

The Sustainable Web Interest Group published  today a first public Draft Note of Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG).

The digital industry is responsible for 2-5% of global emissions, more than the aviation industry. The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) cover a wide range of recommendations to make web products and services more sustainable.

These guidelines use planetary, people, and prosperity principles (the PPP approach) throughout the decision-making process, allowing users to minimize their environmental impact in various ways. These include user-centered design, performant web development, carbon-free infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and, supported by measurability data, various combinations thereof.

The guidelines are in line with the Sustainable Web Manifesto and aligned with GRI Standards to help organizations incorporate digital products and services into broader sustainability reporting initiatives. The structure of WSG is inspired by WCAG with 92 guidelines and 254 success criteria. Every guideline is supported by evidence, and additional information sections provide examples, specific benefits, and compliance reporting metrics (based upon GRI). Further testability guidance and techniques for criteria can be found within W3C Editor's Draft Sustainable Tooling and Reporting (STAR).

Since the formal chartering of the W3C Interest Group in October 2024 and after the community group report became an editor's draft, significant progress was made including:

• Editorial improvements for clarity and readability were applied across all areas of work including the addition of new content where applicable to provide greater sustainability coverage.
• The introduction was edited, and contains new material on supplements and relationships to other specifications.
• A new “considerations” section of the document identifies accessibility, security and privacy tangent issues that interlink with sustainability topics.
• Breaking down of the specification into a paginated view to improve readability, with a full document mode available for those who prefer - including the ability to filter guidelines and success criteria by areas of interest, allowing for granular content control.
• Addition of a separate resources supplement, categorized by success criteria, cross-referenced within the specification, that provides over 2,500 regularly maintained sustainability related citations, tools, resources, and materials to help with implementation and adoption.

This W3C Group Draft Note will be further developed to ensure it meets the needs of its expected audience, and the group will continue to work on improving the usefulness of the specification. Notably, the inclusion of an Impact API is under development by the Interest Group’s Measurability Task Force. It aims to provide measurement-based scoring to identify more easily where the priority of effort should begin, but also to provide a sensible approach to deciding conformity levels within the scope of the specification.