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I wrote a blog post about these proposals a couple of weeks ago and a nice HN thread formed around it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445 https://new
by dfabulich 9y ago
I wrote a blog post about these proposals a couple of weeks ago and a nice HN thread formed around it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16424445
But as I said in my post, the problem with posts like today's AMP blog post is that they're too full of jargon to be comprehensible to a general audience. The Web Packaging standard is really cool, but today's blog post just linked out to a ton of web standards without defining them or explaining how they'll work in the future.
If you've got your head deep in AMP's community, this post is quite meaningful, but to everyone else, and especially to the huge community of developers who hate AMP, it reads like Greek.
It reflects a core problem with AMP's developer outreach strategy: a refusal to accept and acknowledge criticism. There are overwhelmingly more AMP detractors than AMP promoters, and the detractors have good arguments, arguments that the AMP team even kinda sorta accepts (which is why they're trying to push through these browser standards, to address the bugs).
But you'll never hear AMP technical leaders like Malte Ubl or Paul Bakaus saying, "Yes, we accept that criticism, and the problems with AMP are really serious, and here's what we're doing to fix this. In the meanwhile, for many sites the tradeoff is worth it anyway."
The top thread in the HN thread was not whether the AMP brand was toxic but why the AMP brand is toxic. I think that if the AMP team had somebody focused on telling AMP's story, humbly and honestly, with a focus on the web developer community on HN, Reddit, Smashing, etc. it could have really helped.
Now, I think it's too late. The new Web Packaging thing shouldn't be called "AMP." The new "AMP for email" thing shouldn't be called AMP, either, because everybody knows that AMP sucks, and there's really no way to claw your way back from that.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoAnd Apple is bound to take a decade to implement the standard, so publishers will have to stick with AMP for the foreseeable future.
- wmf 9y agotelling AMP's story, humbly and honestly What would that look like? "We have a gun to your head"? There are some very uncomfortable truths here about Google's near-monopoly on Web traffic.
- dfabulich 9y agoIf you want the details, I did write a blog post about this. https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-googles-amp-without-slowing-it-down-522bc5e1e11d https://redfin.engineering/how-to-fix-googles-amp-without-sl... tl;dr: iframes cause all of AMP's problems, but they provide unbeatable performance, thanks to prerendering. Prerendering is faster than http://motherfuckingwebsite.com http://motherfuckingwebsite.com. The Web Packaging standard will allow Google to prerender sites in search results without AMP, and without violating users' privacy. But here's the point: most people think that Google wants to host nytimes articles on google.com, to seize control of the web's traffic. They don't. They've done a bunch of work to get out of that business while preserving the performance benefits of prerendering, but nobody knows that, because they talk about it in bizarre technical jargon like today's OP AMP blog post.
- x0x0 9y agoWhy should we trust a monopolist that -- and this is totes a coincidence! -- is pushing a standard that breaks all urls to point to them? This is the next attempt after google plus or whatever their stupid social network is/was. They're basically terrified of facebook and, instead of supporting the internet, they're trying to become fb. But in your browser. Pretending google didn't want to steal all urls requires actively ignoring the last 10 years of google's corporate decisions.
- dfabulich 9y agoI'm not telling you to trust them. I'm certainly not telling you to use AMP. I'm just saying, they've done a lot of work on this Web Packaging thing, and it's a pretty good replacement for AMP. You should check it out. It's hard to see why they'd do all of that work of replacing AMP if your theory is right and they just loooved stealing those URLs.
- x0x0 9y agoBecause 1 - they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar 2 - the internet isn't quite as dumb as google hoped 3 - thank god for the EU & Margrethe Vestager. Maybe we can talk her into adding a zero. ps -- that status, as near as I can tell, of the amp url fix is vaporware. Deployed yet? Nope. So let's wait to get all triumphant until their supposed solution is deployed. https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/01/09/google-finally-fixing-urls-amp-pages/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/01/09/google-finally-fixi...
- notatoad 9y agowhat do you think is too technical in the linked blog post? i have never worked with AMP code or implemented AMP, and i was able to understand it just fine. And i don't think i'm any cleverer than the average web developer on here. They're expanding the carousel of AMP links on the SERP to include content packaged using the new web packaging standard . Seems straightforward enough to me. >The new Web Packaging thing shouldn't be called "AMP". it isn't...