We were discussing with the AMP project tech lead over on GitHub trying to suss out details about governance and the like, and it's even scarier than we thought when it came to AMP4Email: Gmail is implementing AMP in email "the way they want to", and AMP Project is just deciding whether or not they want to support it/publish a 'standard'.<p>I strongly recommend this for reading: <a href="https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597</a> (locked, sadly) and the original AMP4Email issue has a fair bit as well: <a href="https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13457</a> (only for discussion of email).<p>Unfortunately, there are lots of people talking about how bad AMP is, and why, but nobody yet has suggested how we do anything to stop it.
> If Google would have a genuine interest in speeding up the whole web on mobile, it could simply preload resources of non-AMP pages as well.<p>... but they've been doing exactly that for ages. Originally with link rel=prefetch, and later with ever more elaborate schemes which I think culminated with this: <a href="https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/ahSpGgohSDo" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/+IlyaGrigorik/posts/ahSpGgohSDo</a><p>But prefetching based on giving hints to the browser has a bunch of problems. The most obvious one is the one hinted at here: you can have either something ineffective, or something that's effective but complex and not supported across all browsers.<p>> Not doing this is a strong hint that another agenda is at work, to say the least.<p>The sinister agenda of wanting things to actually work well.
There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package.<p>2017 IETF proposal by Google: <a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cases-00" rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas...</a><p>2018 Chrome demo at AMP event: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc</a><p>There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: <a href="https://w3c.github.io/wpub/" rel="nofollow">https://w3c.github.io/wpub/</a>
You can add a controversy to the new controversy presented in the article, because even that conditional speed improvement only happens if you ignore the rest of the environment. Meaning, it will be significant if the user is arriving from google search and only focused on browsing.<p>If the user has GPS consuming 3G data, or some other app they care about, and only did a quick google search to confirm something, now the GPS or other app data will be severely limited while the browser download all that crap about some 20 different sites the user will never ever visit.<p>I personally disable preloading on everything, because waiting 3s for a page to show up is a very fine tradeoff to control what my device is downloading and when.
Only thing I can't figure out is why is anyone buying into it in the first place?<p>Has the publishers not learned anything from Facebook taking their content and readers hostage? Sure, it gives you traffic boost in the beginning, but sooner or later it will force you to play by their rules and generate content <i>for them</i>.
I see AMP as a marketing opportunity for a cheap SEO. If more visitors come to my client's or boss's website and get familiar with it, it's a win situation for me as the programmer/maintainer of the said website.<p>More users don't equal increased ad revenue with AMP. If ads are not a thing you are selling, you are probably losing free attention if you aren't already exploiting AMP.
Cache is part of AMP spec. What author seems to refer to is only a 2/3 of AMP spec - Subset of HTML and JS library.<p>Since the beginning AMP team was clear that AMP is not very useful without cache.<p>I do agree with all of the concerns raised, but wanted to point this out as to not get sidestepped from the main discussion.<p><a href="https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/</a>
<a href="https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/</a>
AMP is one of a long series of Google's efforts to ensure the web remains competitive with walled gardens and native platforms. Chrome (with the V8 engine), NaCl, SPDY, QUIC, PWA, Dart, Certificate Transparency ... the list goes on and on. Some have succeeded (SPDY became HTTP/2) and some have failed (Dart, NaCl), but it has been consistent at least.<p>Standards cannot become a strait-jacket. In many cases (such as HTTP/2) the standards have come much after the concept was proven. Though Dart and NaCl failed, they triggered improvements in Javascript and also led to WebAssembly.<p>AMP was created as a response to Facebook's Instant Articles. If anyone supports the open web, then it is hard to see how things become better if the web stays stuck as more content moves into walled gardens, or the web remains unusable on mobile phones in large parts of the world.<p>Maybe there is no controversy, because there is no need for one.
Side note, install this extension to make medium pages readable by removing the useless top and bottom bars: <a href="https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA</a>
As an aside, I truly dislike lazy loading. If it's really that important to perceived page speed, isn't it something that the <i>browsers</i> should be implementing, rather than everyone and his brother breaking HTML and require full JavaScript execution in order to display images?
Where can I find a good explanation of what "AMP Email" and the controversy surrounding it are? I was hoping this article would detail it because I've seen buzz about it recently
>The term “open source” is meaningless if the thing that is open source is harmful.<p>A note on "harmful" as an adjective: It depends on the speaker.<p>any open source project aiming to bypass the Great Firewall of China is "harmful", according to the Communist Party.
"Something only Google is capable of, because it is the only entity in the world controlling the most important information portal: search."<p>How is Google the only search engine? A different one is literally a click away. This just doesn't pass as an argument.
Would it be possible to use amp just for your landing pages from google, and take advantage of instant loading, and then, from within the amp served page, surreptitiously move to you own preload accelerated site ?
Google can't "simply preload resources of non-AMP pages". Using a CDN means they can get more consistent load times and avoid the inevitable privacy concerns that come with loading 3rd party content the user may never actually click on.