Discuss where to process data

[jyasskin]

I'm writing a TAG comment on an extension to the Web Speech API. One user of the API is captioning speech in a video conference system. My understanding is that they currently intend to

• have each recipient run speech-to-text on the audio they receive.

Two other possible architectures are that

• each sender runs speech-to-text on the audio they're sending, so the text can be shared between all recipients, or
• the server runs speech-to-text centrally in their data center.

I was hoping to find a principle in the Sustainability Guidelines that would cover this, which I could cite in my comment, but I don't see one. For example, you could say to "avoid redundant processing", and you could discuss the rough difference in energy efficiency between computing something on a server vs a client.

[AlexDawsonUK]

We have added a new SC to 4.9 providing explicit guidance on avoiding redundant processing and the need to determine whether client or server-side is the best method of processing and or delivery.

[jyasskin]

FWIW, a section on asynchronous processing is not where I would look to find guidance on allocating computation between clients and servers, which might happen either in real time or asynchronously.

I also wouldn't look in a section on client/server allocation to find guidance on redundant processing, which might occur as a result of decisions to avoid storing computable data or to distribute computation to edge non-client nodes.

[AlexDawsonUK]

Can you think of a better guideline where it would be more appropriately located within?

[jyasskin]

Both points seem to fit inside https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/#hosting-infrastructure-and-systems, but as siblings of https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/#be-mindful-of-duplicate-data and https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/#consider-cdns-and-edge-caching rather than inside either.

The guidelines as a whole need to be restructured and simplified, and perhaps while doing that the WG will find a new heading that unifies these guidelines with some of the others in their category.