Every thread about AMP on Hacker News goes exactly the same way. It’s annoying, repetitive.<p>But here’s the thing: while I get criticisms about AMP for web, pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email. The author of this article keeps bringing up points about AMP for web as if they have anything to do with AMP for email.<p>AMP for email basically does one thing: it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitrary code. It is standard and other email providers can implement it. You’d think this premise would be popular on HN, but it’s not, all because people are still caught up over the effectively unrelated usage of AMP in Google Search.<p>If you don’t like AMP in Google Search, fine. I find it fairly annoying too, though admittedly once the URL issue is fixed it will probably stop bothering me. Or not at all, since I actually tend to use Duck Duck Go anyways. But can we stop ruining every discussion with this non-sense? It’s tiring, and I don’t even like AMP. It’s gotten to the point where saying something bad about AMP is probably the easiest way to hit HN frontpage with no effort.<p>(Disclosure, I work for Google, not on anything related to AMP. Seriously, I still dislike AMP.)
Maybe this is selection bias or just plain old regular curmudgery, but I can't stand amp. I have a modern device and fast internet everywhere I go with my phone. I find amp sites to be consistently slower, uglier and less navigable than the request-desktop version of a site. My phone, and most other low-mid to high end phones have the sreeen real estate and processing power to handle and use desktop versions of a site.<p>Retaining a familiar interface across devices leads to faster site usage than any speed gains that might be happening because of amp. Measuring the speed of a website in kb/s alone isn't a good enough metric, and the standardisation attempts of amp are ugly imo.
AMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare.<p>Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load.<p>At Cloudflare there are other problems. If you're a CF customer and have the option enabled, your AMP page hosted on CF servers will do some nasty stuff. Specifically outgoing links to third party domains will be <i>mirrored</i> onto cloudflare's servers and re-hosted. Presented to anyone clicking off your CF AMP page as the actual site but not. Instead CF gets the hits and you never see it. I've seen the CF bots doing this to my domain. But CF never responds to emails from anyone that isn't a customer.<p>As for AMP for email I don't know the specific downsides besides the obvious corporate centralization and control this gives. But it certainly doesn't have any purpose. And I say this as a guy that only reads email as text and never renders HTML.
I really wish the email standard was markdown instead of HTML.<p>I only ever switch from text-only when I need to embed an image, and otherwise <i>occasionally</i> italics or whatever is useful. This could be taken care of with a basic markdown-like language, and avoid getting full HTML advertisements, etc. I really, really don't need your newsletter to be properly formatted in my mailbox, just send a link, I'll open it in the browser if I want to.
There are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to scatter the landscape, I can’t say I’m against someone actually trying to lock some standards down on the email platform.<p>The counter is that we don’t need all the css and pizzazz in emails, but we’ve come too far to realistically go back on that.
The article looks a bit suspicious and FUD to me: first they say "here is five reasons why AMP in Gmail is bad" and then just put out five general essays about how Google is bad.<p>AMP as tech is certainly good for users. Google pushes it a tad too hard and sometimes is at the edge of abusing it, but overall effect on UX is very positive. There's no monopoly here: anyone can take advantage of this tech (and I believe most search engines do). AMP in email is even more innocent: in the end, you already are inside Gmail inbox, what could go wrong from there?<p>Current Gmail actions[1] are very useful, and if AMP could do even better - count me in.<p>[1] <a href="https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview#gmail_actions" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/overview#gmail_ac...</a><p>edit: link to Gmail actions
And the author completely disregards the elephant in the room. Why do websites slow themselves down with trackers, etc.? It pays to do so.<p>Decrying that without presenting an alternative sustainable monetization model for the web is just pointless yelling.
AMP in email was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it was first announced. I ended up completely closing my paid GApps account and migrating my email over to RunBox instead; I also as much as possible reduced my use of Google properties (basically everything that’s not YouTube) and started blocking all Google cookies outright outside of a container tab for YouTube.<p>If anyone’s interested I wrote up how I chose an alternative email supplier at <a href="https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/" rel="nofollow">https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/</a>
lol. anyone have to read past the headline to know it's bad?!?!<p>everyone forgot the only purpose of amp? to give in to google so that you can get not-banished from their search results.<p>why would anyone apply a pernicious SEO technique to email?<p>what's next? an article on why rat poison on bread is a bad idea?
Off topic, but voting on comments should not primarily be used to signal disagreement. "Good" comments (for some definition of "good") can be upvoted even if they argue a viewpoint you disagree with.<p>Otherwise all that remains is an echo chamber.
I can't belive the neckbeard level in here. "I do all my web browsing with curl and vim. Nobody needs AMP!"<p>Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh.<p>AMP is not "bad" or "good". Get over yourselves and your moral peacocking and get back to measuring things objectively. Everyone who upvoted this crap needs to consider why. Is it because AMP fails to accomplish its goals? Or is it because you share a sentiment with the author -- that "Google and AMP are ruining lives and, even worse, the web, the holy web, and that they must be stopped in the name of the holy Linus, who set us free from the proprietary code, and... Where was I?"
"God, you're the worst DM."
"Yes. Yes I am."
AMP for email is targeting a completely different topic than the issues listed here and in the article. And i am shocked everybody is simply not seeing them with their amp4web hate.<p>Amp for email is completely different than amp for web and is a very good solution:
1. Coding emails is really really hard. Every client is rendering emails differently, and Outlook is a beast with every version rendering differently. Amp for email is standardizing a subset of email and css every client should support so email building will be easier.
2. Email is completely different than the web. You cant do more than basic html like displaying text and pictures. Embedding videos? Slideshows for products? Interactivity like forms? Display realtime information? EVERYTHING IS NOT POSSIBLE! But it will be with amp4email. You will get features in emails compared to the web so they will get usefully again.<p>And i am afraid nobody is seeing this and only hating amp4web‘s hiding if the real urls etc.