I write about AMP on here [1][2]. Some of the author's points reflect my own; but I don't quite agree on how he arrives at his point. It's true that the big ga

I write about AMP on here [1][2]. Some of the author's points reflect my own; but I don't quite agree on how he arrives at his point. It's true that the big gatekeepers like Google and Facebook are treating their proprietary formats preferentially. I don't in itself see this as problematic. It's true that these formats are not plain text, so code or the aid of some framework or publishing platform is wise if one wants to publish in such a way. This isn't a new development, because Wordpress and other platforms have been around for more than a decade, and hand-posting plaintext documents went out of fashion precisely because of the ease of manageability that publishing and blogging tools provide. The original incarnation of self-publishing on the Web died when most ISPs decided not to allow home servers on residential plans, and truly became nonsensical when DDOS attacks became commonplace. Once we moved to the loosely-interpreted re-imagining of self-publishing where we host our files out of someone else's server, there's little point to not relying on an application that ingests your text and transforms it into whatever form is most advantageous for the given situation: AMP when serving through Google, FB Instant Articles when serving through Facebook, plain text or plain HTML if so preferred. EDIT: I don't disagree that it's unfortunate that the web is less decentralized, more proprietary, less open-access than it used to be. A large contributor is that a few big players control most discoverability, and alternatives are slow to take off due to network effects. Other decentralized networks always grapple with discoverability; ones that have it solved also rely on a few big players, but in most cases this is perceived as less of a problem. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20"AMP"&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20"AMP"&sort=byDate&ty... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12722969