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In a large enough organization, improving site performance is hard, as you have to win political battles against your marketing / bizdev teams, denying them the

In a large enough organization, improving site performance is hard, as you have to win political battles against your marketing / bizdev teams, denying them the analytics packages they want in the name of performance. "We could do that, but then we'd lose the special AMP placement on Google SERPs" is a much more compelling argument, and preferable to starting a proxy war between the CMO and the CTO. Google has done a hell of a job flexing their Search muscles to encourage the behavior they want, here. All the while somehow open-washing the project so that SEO-types make the ridiculous statements you quoted, implying that AMP isn't a Google owned-and-run project. On an engineering level, I respect AMP. From an anti-competitive / social engineering perspective, it's absolutely terrifying.

underwater 9y ago
AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. This is not how sites are generally built, and at least for me, meant rebuilding large parts of my build process. Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use otherwise.
- fooker 9y ago
  >'how sites are built' I take a look at the average mobile web page and thank Google that AMP brings sone restrictions.
  - underwater 9y ago
    Then why pretend that it’s still just a web page? Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      Because becoming essentially Chrome only is the antithesis of their core business model of getting as many eyeballs as possible. Not particularly good for the web either. From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - fooker 9y ago
        >From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed. Webassembly
      - hrktb 9y ago
        protocol buffer ?
    - realusername 9y ago
      > Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format. That's exactly what they are doing with Instant Apps, they just try different strategies to control the web more at the same time.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. How is limiting size and server round-trips of CSS not related to the problem being solved by AMP?
  - SahAssar 9y ago
    Because that's a problem that should be solved with HTTP2 push, not with inlining.
    - fooker 9y ago
      Why can AMP pages not use that? This seems like an orthogonal issue.
      - SahAssar 9y ago
        They can, but instead they do it the wrong way.
lern_too_spel 9y ago
Why is it absolutely terrifying or anticompetitive? Microsoft implements its own AMP cache and has decided to use similar presentation for its AMP results. Baidu and Yahoo! Japan, both dominant in their own markets, also implement AMP caches.
- jakecopp 9y ago
  Could you elaborate on this, I'm interested? It is Google's AMP spec or their own version?
  - Itaxpica 9y ago
    The AMP spec, as written, allows anyone to host an AMP cache and serve AMP pages. Google’s is the biggest and the one you reach through Google search so people tend to assume it’s the only one, but Cloudflare runs one as well, along with the ones mentioned in the parent comment. For more details, you can read the (very readable) AMP docs: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/how_cached https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/how_cached
    - diggan 9y ago
      I've done a previous comment on HN asking someone for a link to the spec for the AMP cache, but there is none. How can you claim it's a open technology (pointing at Google, not Itaxpica or any others on HN) when there is no way (except reverse-engineer) to figure out how the cache works?
      - Itaxpica 9y ago
        The spec is on github: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/spec https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/spec and the code itself is one level up (github.com/ampproject/amphtml) Here’s the section on guidelines for implementing an AMP cache: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...
donohoe 9y ago
Yes - if you have ad networks to deal with. Airbnb really doesn’t.

underwater 9y ago

AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. This is not how sites are generally built, and at least for me, meant rebuilding large parts of my build process. Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use otherwise.

fooker 9y ago
>'how sites are built' I take a look at the average mobile web page and thank Google that AMP brings sone restrictions.
- underwater 9y ago
  Then why pretend that it’s still just a web page? Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Because becoming essentially Chrome only is the antithesis of their core business model of getting as many eyeballs as possible. Not particularly good for the web either. From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - fooker 9y ago
      >From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed. Webassembly
    - hrktb 9y ago
      protocol buffer ?
  - realusername 9y ago
    > Google might as well drop the charade and push an proprietary binary format. That's exactly what they are doing with Instant Apps, they just try different strategies to control the web more at the same time.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> AMP has a whole suite of technical limitations that are unrelated to the problem being solved. For example they limit pages to 50k (pre-gzip) of unlined CSS rather than allowing stylesheets to be linked. How is limiting size and server round-trips of CSS not related to the problem being solved by AMP?
- SahAssar 9y ago
  Because that's a problem that should be solved with HTTP2 push, not with inlining.
  - fooker 9y ago
    Why can AMP pages not use that? This seems like an orthogonal issue.
    - SahAssar 9y ago
      They can, but instead they do it the wrong way.

lern_too_spel 9y ago

Why is it absolutely terrifying or anticompetitive? Microsoft implements its own AMP cache and has decided to use similar presentation for its AMP results. Baidu and Yahoo! Japan, both dominant in their own markets, also implement AMP caches.

jakecopp 9y ago
Could you elaborate on this, I'm interested? It is Google's AMP spec or their own version?
- Itaxpica 9y ago
  The AMP spec, as written, allows anyone to host an AMP cache and serve AMP pages. Google’s is the biggest and the one you reach through Google search so people tend to assume it’s the only one, but Cloudflare runs one as well, along with the ones mentioned in the parent comment. For more details, you can read the (very readable) AMP docs: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/how_cached https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/how_cached
  - diggan 9y ago
    I've done a previous comment on HN asking someone for a link to the spec for the AMP cache, but there is none. How can you claim it's a open technology (pointing at Google, not Itaxpica or any others on HN) when there is no way (except reverse-engineer) to figure out how the cache works?
    - Itaxpica 9y ago
      The spec is on github: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/spec https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/master/spec and the code itself is one level up (github.com/ampproject/amphtml) Here’s the section on guidelines for implementing an AMP cache: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-cache-guidelines.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...

donohoe 9y ago

Yes - if you have ad networks to deal with. Airbnb really doesn’t.