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AMP would be commendable if it came about as a open standard, and won in the marketplace. But it's come out controlled by the major search engine, that will pr

AMP would be commendable if it came about as a open standard, and won in the marketplace. But it's come out controlled by the major search engine, that will promote and highlight pages in it's search rankings if you adhere to their new "open" standard. It may still be good, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

MatthewPhillips 10y ago
I mean, AMP is a bunch of custom elements and instructions not to use certain features that degrade performance. I'm not sure what part of this you want to be an "open standard", can you be more specific? AMP is more of a best practices guide than anything else.
- anilgulecha 10y ago
  I mean google will show a lightning icon next to pages that follow the AMP standard (and plausibly use it as a positive signal in their ranking algorithm). A competing standard would not have these benefits.
  - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
    I was told by cramforce that there's no need to use AMP if your page is already fast on its own.
    - anilgulecha 10y ago
      Would you get the lightning icon without AMP?
      - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
        The lightning icon is a carrot, you're assuming malice where it doesn't exist. The lightning icon will go away when being fast is the expectation.
        anilgulecha 10y ago
        These carrots drive ad dollars, hence my distaste to calling this a "open standard". As an example, w3c got together to say solid HTTPS websites get a green color in the URL bar. Banks, etc get a higher, more highlighted green color for a special class of certificates. These are open standards that everyone agreed on. I hope this makes it more clear why AMP is not a open standard.
    - inian 10y ago
      Yup, just that your fast loading web page won't get the special treatment that AMP pages get on the search results page
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- callahad 10y ago
  A good place to start would be admitting just one person to AMP's Governance board that's not on Google's payroll. No single for-profit organization should control something as fundamental as the Web's markup.
- pcwalton 10y ago
  The unfortunate thing about AMP from my point of view as a browser developer is that it disincentivizes me from making performance improvements. What's the point in making something faster in a competing browser if Google is preventing developers from using that feature until it's fast in Blink? Having a new gatekeeper in addition to the standards bodies that we have to get all new features by holds back the Web.
  - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
    Google isn't a new gatekeeper, there's tons of documentation on their domain already that instructs developers to use/not use certain features for the sake of pagerank. Go look at PageSpeed for example. It would be great if we didn't have to worry about performance, I hope WebRender gets us there some day, please do continue your work and hopefully the fact that some subset of news sites aren't using features doesn't hold you back. In the meantime I'm going to avoid using with(), use requestAnimationFrame to prevent dom thrashing, put my scripts at the end of the body, and do all of the things maybe some day I won't have to do.
firasd 10y ago
I think they wanted to move quickly to offer a substitute to Facebook Instant Articles without waiting for other players in the market (Bing? Mobile browsers?) to adopt it in their own time…
- anilgulecha 10y ago
  Not adopt, but drive. Mozilla, for one. W3C or IETF for others. Edit: Looks like you updated your comment. Initially it asked who could competing adopters be.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  Maybe it's the change to the News Feed algorithm but I've seen way fewer of these Instant Articles over time for some reason.
  - sp332 10y ago
    Yup, Facebook dialed back pretty hard on that plan. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12006392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12006392
m_eiman 10y ago
They could have made the spec a subset of HTML, but decided that having "control" was more important. Too bad, could've been neat.
- seagreen 10y ago
  Has there been any work at all done on staking out workable subsets of HTML? I looked around a fair amount a while ago and the closest thing I could find was AMP. I think this is an important issue because the HTML spec is crazy long and it would be awesome for new technologies (say a new desktop GUI library or whatever) to be able to say "we allow and will interpret this subset some HTML" without committing to the entire byzantine spec.
  - m_eiman 10y ago
    I don't think HTML itself is the problem, what sucks up all those CPU cycles is Javascript and CSS. So remove (almost) all of Javascript and big parts of CSS and we're good to go. We need a name for this and since it's HTML5 with stuff removed we can call it HTML5--, so HTML4 ;)
    - seagreen 10y ago
      JS and CSS are obviously super messy, but that's a whole different issue. I'm thinking more of cases like letting people write some HTML in a local notetaking program or something like that -- what's a nice subset of tags you should give them so they can make text look good, but doesn't commit you to supporting the lovecraftian being that's the entire HTML spec? Also your last line made me laugh. Nice delivery=)

MatthewPhillips 10y ago

I mean, AMP is a bunch of custom elements and instructions not to use certain features that degrade performance. I'm not sure what part of this you want to be an "open standard", can you be more specific? AMP is more of a best practices guide than anything else.

anilgulecha 10y ago
I mean google will show a lightning icon next to pages that follow the AMP standard (and plausibly use it as a positive signal in their ranking algorithm). A competing standard would not have these benefits.
- MatthewPhillips 10y ago
  I was told by cramforce that there's no need to use AMP if your page is already fast on its own.
  - anilgulecha 10y ago
    Would you get the lightning icon without AMP?
    - MatthewPhillips 10y ago
      The lightning icon is a carrot, you're assuming malice where it doesn't exist. The lightning icon will go away when being fast is the expectation.
      - anilgulecha 10y ago
        These carrots drive ad dollars, hence my distaste to calling this a "open standard". As an example, w3c got together to say solid HTTPS websites get a green color in the URL bar. Banks, etc get a higher, more highlighted green color for a special class of certificates. These are open standards that everyone agreed on. I hope this makes it more clear why AMP is not a open standard.
  - inian 10y ago
    Yup, just that your fast loading web page won't get the special treatment that AMP pages get on the search results page
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
callahad 10y ago
A good place to start would be admitting just one person to AMP's Governance board that's not on Google's payroll. No single for-profit organization should control something as fundamental as the Web's markup.
pcwalton 10y ago
The unfortunate thing about AMP from my point of view as a browser developer is that it disincentivizes me from making performance improvements. What's the point in making something faster in a competing browser if Google is preventing developers from using that feature until it's fast in Blink? Having a new gatekeeper in addition to the standards bodies that we have to get all new features by holds back the Web.
- MatthewPhillips 10y ago
  Google isn't a new gatekeeper, there's tons of documentation on their domain already that instructs developers to use/not use certain features for the sake of pagerank. Go look at PageSpeed for example. It would be great if we didn't have to worry about performance, I hope WebRender gets us there some day, please do continue your work and hopefully the fact that some subset of news sites aren't using features doesn't hold you back. In the meantime I'm going to avoid using with(), use requestAnimationFrame to prevent dom thrashing, put my scripts at the end of the body, and do all of the things maybe some day I won't have to do.

firasd 10y ago

I think they wanted to move quickly to offer a substitute to Facebook Instant Articles without waiting for other players in the market (Bing? Mobile browsers?) to adopt it in their own time…

anilgulecha 10y ago
Not adopt, but drive. Mozilla, for one. W3C or IETF for others. Edit: Looks like you updated your comment. Initially it asked who could competing adopters be.
Yhippa 10y ago
Maybe it's the change to the News Feed algorithm but I've seen way fewer of these Instant Articles over time for some reason.
- sp332 10y ago
  Yup, Facebook dialed back pretty hard on that plan. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12006392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12006392

m_eiman 10y ago

They could have made the spec a subset of HTML, but decided that having "control" was more important. Too bad, could've been neat.

seagreen 10y ago
Has there been any work at all done on staking out workable subsets of HTML? I looked around a fair amount a while ago and the closest thing I could find was AMP. I think this is an important issue because the HTML spec is crazy long and it would be awesome for new technologies (say a new desktop GUI library or whatever) to be able to say "we allow and will interpret this subset some HTML" without committing to the entire byzantine spec.
- m_eiman 10y ago
  I don't think HTML itself is the problem, what sucks up all those CPU cycles is Javascript and CSS. So remove (almost) all of Javascript and big parts of CSS and we're good to go. We need a name for this and since it's HTML5 with stuff removed we can call it HTML5--, so HTML4 ;)
  - seagreen 10y ago
    JS and CSS are obviously super messy, but that's a whole different issue. I'm thinking more of cases like letting people write some HTML in a local notetaking program or something like that -- what's a nice subset of tags you should give them so they can make text look good, but doesn't commit you to supporting the lovecraftian being that's the entire HTML spec? Also your last line made me laugh. Nice delivery=)