7 ms·

AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stu

AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages. But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting that fight. It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.

saudioger 8y ago
This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS feature garbage. I've been fighting against adding additional tracking forever, but constantly get railroaded by marketing because "they're the ones that know how to make us profitable." Fundamentally I hate what it means for the internet, but I finally have a little power to say "no we can't do that."
- Angostura 8y ago
  Can you simply replace AMP with GDPR?
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    Nah, blame the EU for all of those pop-over ads that you see on sites like Tedium. You first saw pop-overs to harass people abut cookies as required in the EU, thus everybody learned how to make pop-overs and pop-overs were legitimized because they aren't just advertising but something perceived to be required by regulation.
    - acdha 8y ago
      > You first saw pop-overs to harass people abut cookies as required in the EU That's a rather a-historical way to describe that. The various cookie notifications used what was already common code to implement it since most people didn't want to spend much time on what they saw as a formality.
    - nkkollaw 8y ago
      Sure, blame the EU for trying to stop companies from keeping your contacts, pictures, location history or whatever just because you signed up to write a review or comment an article. If companies can't manage to offer their service without exploiting your data and have to blacklist Europe, that's a win to me.
      - mrep 8y ago
        But is it worth the cost of forcing all EU users into not even having the option to use said service for data? Thankfully, I don't live in the EU because I would be super pissed about all the websites blocking me because the EU no longer wants to give me the option to trade some data for a free service and I expect it to get a LOT worse once they start actually enacting fines and every company realizes that that they have really been force opting in people to data collection so it is no longer profitable to serve the EU. In my opinion, it would be far far better to force companies to offer a "fair price" paid service in exchange for not collecting data (I'm 100% for taking them to court if they misrepresent the value your data provides so they don't overprice it forcing people to choose the free option). That way, I can choose to keep getting my free service in exchange for data and you guys can pay to protect your privacy. Does this option sound reasonable to you?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        bkor 8y ago
        > But is it worth the cost of forcing all EU users into not even having the option to use said service for data? Pretty much everything you stated here is completely wrong. GDPR states that personal information can only be collected on an opt-in basis. Your entire statement therefore is completely off. Because it has to be freely opt-in you cannot just do an opt-out. > In my opinion, it would be far far better to force companies to offer a "fair price" paid service in exchange for not collecting data The GDPR doesn't force to use anything for free.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    maybe temporarily, but as soon as all the third-party js that slows down your site start advertising themselves as GDPR-compliant, that goes away.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  It is astonishing how hard it can be to internally sell any kind of web quality features to management in both for profit and non-profit organizations. There is also a real herd effect. Many people will do whatever Matt Cutts tells them because they think it will be good for their SEO. Yeah right. Some of the people who are good at SEO either went to work for huge brands or quasi-competitors of Google (like about.com) that might have some ability to bring Google to anti-trust court; most of the others switched to paid advertising once they figured out that Google won't let you win at SEO. Certainly people who write for Spamium (aka Tedium) are the ones who try herd-following methods of getting traffic and they tend to be impressed when they get 100 hits on their blog.
  - grivescorbett 8y ago
    Why not provide the bottom / top line impact of page optimization? Your business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses. They do not care about making the web good, nor should they IMHO. Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      Death by a thousand cuts. Everyone wants to add just one little resource, until you end up with 8MB pages with 20 seconds time to interactive. They can all make a plausible argument for how their one little resource will improve the bottom line, even considering the performance impact. If you have one person or one team responsible for performance, they're constantly fighting on all fronts just to stand still. You need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain.
      - chiefalchemist 8y ago
        You" need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain." How about customer-centric culture? One where UX is #1, and not out of sight?
- KallDrexx 8y ago
  > This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS feature garbage. That doesn't sound like it relieves you of maintaining a bogged down version of the site, it just means in addition to maintaining the bogged down version you have to now also maintain the amp version, and keep them consistent.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    Yes, and execs will give you more budget to maintain the additional site, which they're encouraged to do due to Business Deals or whatever they read on LinkedIn.
- gehsty 8y ago
  Seems like it is more of a problem with how the company is ran than a positive of using AMP.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    It's a problem with how almost every company is run.
  - deadbunny 8y ago
    Just like every other issue in every company ever.
kodablah 8y ago
> If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. Yes...do all the same things but without requiring Google proxy it. There are several things orgs will do to optimize SEO, conforming to AMP rules can be another. Gaming SEO is a concern for all SEO requirements so surely that's a poor excuse for proxying. EDIT: But it did give me an idea on how to tell websites you aren't happy with something: https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/91 https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/91
- jasonm23 8y ago
  Just off topic. Love the software ideas as GitHub repo idea.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dccoolgai 8y ago
This guy. This guy has been there.
anitil 8y ago
Wow, this is one of those flips in perspectives that leaves me a bit dazed. Thanks!
flukus 8y ago
> It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem. Have google results punish fat pages. Then we can say "I can do that, but you have to sign this the declaration accepting responsibility for our page hits tanking".
euske 8y ago
Am I only one who feels this is a modern-day reincarnation of WAP? We've been here a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
- tempodox 8y ago
  Yes, but this time you have to donate your soul to Google. Otherwise, your page will just rank lower. WAP didn't have that direct connection with Google search results.
wwweston 8y ago
> AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. There's a certain "theory of the firm" that says corporations exist because they reduce the overhead cost of operating certain enterprises. Things like this -- along with the also oft-seen need to hire consultants to tell some people in your company to do what other people in your company already know needs to be done -- make me wonder if the limits of that theory are well understood.
- BareNakedCoder 8y ago
  "The Nature of the Firm" by Ronald Coase. He called it transaction costs. I ran across this while trying to grok one firm I worked at that managed thru over-governance, funding models, etc to maximize internal transaction costs to the point where it was easier to just hire external expensive consultants.
tokyodude 8y ago
Or slow sites could just die on their own? Is there really a need to try to force the issue? Can't users just get tired of waiting and start going to sites that don't make them wait? Honest question I hate needlessly heavy sites. I just avoid them. I'm also it a fan of AMP. I especially hate the URL is wrong and trying to share the correct URL is tedious
- endless1234 8y ago
  How is a user supposed to know which sites are slow in a search results lists? Mental list of bad domains to not go to?
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Search engine puts a page speed icon in the result, or uses speed in ranking. Not tagging only sites that use the engine's own code.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  How many times have people tried to get sites to be lighter and failed? There is no evidence that we'd just end up with small sites naturally.
Eochei5h 8y ago
But you could still do that without amp.js. Google would just have to push a validator that checks whether a page is the AMP-subset of HTML and CSS, doesn't do any sync loading, etc. etc. And then the engineer could point at validator results.

saudioger 8y ago

This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS feature garbage. I've been fighting against adding additional tracking forever, but constantly get railroaded by marketing because "they're the ones that know how to make us profitable." Fundamentally I hate what it means for the internet, but I finally have a little power to say "no we can't do that."

Angostura 8y ago
Can you simply replace AMP with GDPR?
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  Nah, blame the EU for all of those pop-over ads that you see on sites like Tedium. You first saw pop-overs to harass people abut cookies as required in the EU, thus everybody learned how to make pop-overs and pop-overs were legitimized because they aren't just advertising but something perceived to be required by regulation.
  - acdha 8y ago
    > You first saw pop-overs to harass people abut cookies as required in the EU That's a rather a-historical way to describe that. The various cookie notifications used what was already common code to implement it since most people didn't want to spend much time on what they saw as a formality.
  - nkkollaw 8y ago
    Sure, blame the EU for trying to stop companies from keeping your contacts, pictures, location history or whatever just because you signed up to write a review or comment an article. If companies can't manage to offer their service without exploiting your data and have to blacklist Europe, that's a win to me.
    - mrep 8y ago
      But is it worth the cost of forcing all EU users into not even having the option to use said service for data? Thankfully, I don't live in the EU because I would be super pissed about all the websites blocking me because the EU no longer wants to give me the option to trade some data for a free service and I expect it to get a LOT worse once they start actually enacting fines and every company realizes that that they have really been force opting in people to data collection so it is no longer profitable to serve the EU. In my opinion, it would be far far better to force companies to offer a "fair price" paid service in exchange for not collecting data (I'm 100% for taking them to court if they misrepresent the value your data provides so they don't overprice it forcing people to choose the free option). That way, I can choose to keep getting my free service in exchange for data and you guys can pay to protect your privacy. Does this option sound reasonable to you?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - bkor 8y ago
        > But is it worth the cost of forcing all EU users into not even having the option to use said service for data? Pretty much everything you stated here is completely wrong. GDPR states that personal information can only be collected on an opt-in basis. Your entire statement therefore is completely off. Because it has to be freely opt-in you cannot just do an opt-out. > In my opinion, it would be far far better to force companies to offer a "fair price" paid service in exchange for not collecting data The GDPR doesn't force to use anything for free.
- notatoad 8y ago
  maybe temporarily, but as soon as all the third-party js that slows down your site start advertising themselves as GDPR-compliant, that goes away.
PaulHoule 8y ago
It is astonishing how hard it can be to internally sell any kind of web quality features to management in both for profit and non-profit organizations. There is also a real herd effect. Many people will do whatever Matt Cutts tells them because they think it will be good for their SEO. Yeah right. Some of the people who are good at SEO either went to work for huge brands or quasi-competitors of Google (like about.com) that might have some ability to bring Google to anti-trust court; most of the others switched to paid advertising once they figured out that Google won't let you win at SEO. Certainly people who write for Spamium (aka Tedium) are the ones who try herd-following methods of getting traffic and they tend to be impressed when they get 100 hits on their blog.
- grivescorbett 8y ago
  Why not provide the bottom / top line impact of page optimization? Your business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses. They do not care about making the web good, nor should they IMHO. Your job is to show why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Death by a thousand cuts. Everyone wants to add just one little resource, until you end up with 8MB pages with 20 seconds time to interactive. They can all make a plausible argument for how their one little resource will improve the bottom line, even considering the performance impact. If you have one person or one team responsible for performance, they're constantly fighting on all fronts just to stand still. You need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain.
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      You" need a business-wide performance-oriented culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain." How about customer-centric culture? One where UX is #1, and not out of sight?
KallDrexx 8y ago
> This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS feature garbage. That doesn't sound like it relieves you of maintaining a bogged down version of the site, it just means in addition to maintaining the bogged down version you have to now also maintain the amp version, and keep them consistent.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Yes, and execs will give you more budget to maintain the additional site, which they're encouraged to do due to Business Deals or whatever they read on LinkedIn.
gehsty 8y ago
Seems like it is more of a problem with how the company is ran than a positive of using AMP.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  It's a problem with how almost every company is run.
- deadbunny 8y ago
  Just like every other issue in every company ever.

kodablah 8y ago

> If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. Yes...do all the same things but without requiring Google proxy it. There are several things orgs will do to optimize SEO, conforming to AMP rules can be another. Gaming SEO is a concern for all SEO requirements so surely that's a poor excuse for proxying. EDIT: But it did give me an idea on how to tell websites you aren't happy with something: https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/91 https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/91

jasonm23 8y ago
Just off topic. Love the software ideas as GitHub repo idea.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dccoolgai 8y ago

This guy. This guy has been there.

anitil 8y ago

Wow, this is one of those flips in perspectives that leaves me a bit dazed. Thanks!

flukus 8y ago

> It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only thing that's had any success in tackling this problem. Have google results punish fat pages. Then we can say "I can do that, but you have to sign this the declaration accepting responsibility for our page hits tanking".

euske 8y ago

Am I only one who feels this is a modern-day reincarnation of WAP? We've been here a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

tempodox 8y ago
Yes, but this time you have to donate your soul to Google. Otherwise, your page will just rank lower. WAP didn't have that direct connection with Google search results.

wwweston 8y ago

> AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. There's a certain "theory of the firm" that says corporations exist because they reduce the overhead cost of operating certain enterprises. Things like this -- along with the also oft-seen need to hire consultants to tell some people in your company to do what other people in your company already know needs to be done -- make me wonder if the limits of that theory are well understood.

BareNakedCoder 8y ago
"The Nature of the Firm" by Ronald Coase. He called it transaction costs. I ran across this while trying to grok one firm I worked at that managed thru over-governance, funding models, etc to maximize internal transaction costs to the point where it was easier to just hire external expensive consultants.

tokyodude 8y ago

Or slow sites could just die on their own? Is there really a need to try to force the issue? Can't users just get tired of waiting and start going to sites that don't make them wait? Honest question I hate needlessly heavy sites. I just avoid them. I'm also it a fan of AMP. I especially hate the URL is wrong and trying to share the correct URL is tedious

endless1234 8y ago
How is a user supposed to know which sites are slow in a search results lists? Mental list of bad domains to not go to?
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  Search engine puts a page speed icon in the result, or uses speed in ranking. Not tagging only sites that use the engine's own code.
UncleMeat 8y ago
How many times have people tried to get sites to be lighter and failed? There is no evidence that we'd just end up with small sites naturally.

Eochei5h 8y ago

But you could still do that without amp.js. Google would just have to push a validator that checks whether a page is the AMP-subset of HTML and CSS, doesn't do any sync loading, etc. etc. And then the engineer could point at validator results.