We are welcoming Hidde de Vries with his talk: "The future of the web is green" at FFConf 2026.

We wanted to also thank Hidde for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know him a little bit more before Friday 13th November.

About Hidde and his talk

• Title: The future of the web is green

• About the talk: The tech sector has an elephant in the room: the energy use of digital services can be enormous. In 2024, the World Bank estimated the internet to account for 1-4% of global greenhouse emissions, similar to aviation. The good news is: there are documented and measurable opportunities to improve. From code to infrastructure. As web developers, we can make the web greener at work. In this talk, we'll look at best practices from the W3C's new Web Sustainability Guidelines and beyond, focusing on lessons you can apply today.

• Hidde's origin story: The moment I found out that CU2, the Dutch social network of the early 2000s (now an adult dating website, allegedly), allowed for styling user profiles with HTML, CSS and JS (!), I couldn't stop myself from starting learn some of my favourite programming languages.

The warm up questions

What did your CU2 profile actually look like once you'd got HTML, CSS and JS into it?

Popular profile tweaks at the time were things like floating words that would follow the user's mouse around, blinking text, autoscrolling areas of text (I think we simply used the marquee tag for that), and achieving visual effects with gifs. I am proud to say my profile had all of the above.

Your speaker bios across the web mention a coffee table book on the video conferencing applications of our decade. How far along is it, and what's in it?!

I'm still researching. It's somewhat baffling to me that with all the software engineering efforts that come out of our industry, most video conferencing applications make it unnecessarily hard to have a chat over video. Teams is notorious for making users jump through all sorts of hoops, like incomprehensible login flows.

About the work and the talk

You're a contributor to the Web Sustainability Guidelines. What was the argument you found hardest to settle while they were being written?

One of the pieces I've gotten involved in, is conformance. That was particularly tricky, and it is still actively worked. Conformance is about defining what it means to "meet the Web Sustainability Guidelines", what needs to happen and what can we consider sufficient? You're kind of creating a bar, which can't be too low, as then it could become meaningless, but it can't be too high either: people could end up ignoring it, and it would be harder for organisations to require it, let alone regulators.

Another, slightly related, is how measurement works. It really depends on the requirements: for some it isn't controversial, for others there can be many ways to measure things, or no ways at all. In those cases, estimation is a good alternative for measurement, it's the best we've got.

What's the most common thing teams could do better when they try to measure their site's footprint?

Most teams start with proxy signals for progress, like page weight and Lighthouse scores. Those are easy to measure, and they are great to get started, but don't tell the whole story. Ideally, they would be to focus on the whole system, and include the product's full lifecycle and everything that affects it.

You've said "at work" specifically. What does a developer do when the greener option needs a decision above their pay grade?

There's a lot an individual can do and push for, even if they are not the key decision makers in an organisation. In that sense, sustainability is quite like accessibility: a lot can be improved without explicit approval, you can just do it. When it does need management approval, you could look at how greener options help the organisation comply with regulation. It's not my favourite argument to use, but it can be effective, as it is objective and hard to argue with. Alexander Dawson, who is the lead editor of the Web Sustainability Guidelines keeps a list of relevant laws and policies.

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Find out more about Hidde online at hidde.blog and Mastodon.

Join us in November to see Hidde's talk: 2026.ffconf.org