12 ms·

An open governance model for the AMP Project

80 points by baldfat 8y ago

mmastrac 8y ago
Google AMP was never great as a standard. It's too fuzzy and random and nobody _really_ cares about it beyond the search ranking benefits. I understand where they were coming from, but creating a reduced-interaction, faster-loading HTML subset would require way more spec work than they put in to be self-consistent and long-term maintainable. This is the same sort of reason PNaCl didn't get traction. Both were great science projects, but neither was appropriate as a long-term standard. Hopefully we'll see the WebAssembly equivalent to AMP from the ashes of that project.
- cramforce 8y ago
  There is a lot of movement in that direction. This was the start https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons...
sam0x17 8y ago
Now they just need to move it to the trash bin. Edit: The whole point of AMP is so Google can gain more influence and lock out competitors in the search space. The original article said they have decided to "move AMP into open governance". It is therefore hilarious (and substantive) to say they should "move it into the trash".
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Also: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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  - sam0x17 8y ago
    Note: you guys should really get admin badges for actual HN admins. I thought this was some rando pedantically quoting the rules (and/or an actual Google shill) in response to what would be a straightforward typical comment on any other tech news platform. That said this has seriously shaken my confidence in the quality of discourse on HN and ruined my day. I miss slashdot.
    - Bjartr 8y ago
      (I had a nice long thought-out response for you until a windows update popup appeared mid-sentence, and I accidentally triggered it. Maybe I'll write it all out again later, maybe not. What I write now is a much condensed version) > you guys should really get admin badges for actual HN admins. That might be a good idea > straightforward typical comment on any other tech news platform I visit HN explicitly because it's not a typical tech news platform and isn't full of those typical comments. > It is therefore hilarious (and substantive) hilarious != substantive It was a shallow dismissal, however you slice it. Such comments are not welcome on HN. Please don't post them. > What's so hypocritical about you guys is you upvoted it until dang commented. Upvotes are not king here. Just because people upvoted it does not mean it was a good comment. > That said this has seriously shaken my confidence in the quality of discourse on HN and ruined my day. I am confused that how your comment fared in upvotes somehow has something to do with the quality of discourse on HN. There was no discourse. The fact that you got upvotes but no responses means that despite the fact people engaged with your comment, they didn't discuss anything. There was no discourse. (until my own attempt at a meta-response) And yes, believe it or not, all that is still shorter than what I originally wrote.
      - sam0x17 8y ago
        > I am confused that how your comment fared in upvotes somehow has something to do with the quality of discourse on HN. There was no discourse. The fact that you got upvotes but no responses means that despite the fact people engaged with your comment, they didn't discuss anything. There was no discourse. (until my own attempt at a meta-response) Nothing to do with the upvotes, but you feeling the need to chime in and police.
- deleted 8y ago
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joemaller1 8y ago
This doesn't change the bad smell. AMP feels like it's being forced on us to appease Google so sites will appear in search rankings. The kerfuffle over React's licensing was different. React was a tool the community loved that was hamstrung by a license and opaque ties to Facebook. React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement. One possible upside, this should provide some long-term stability -- something Google is generally not good at.
- kbenson 8y ago
  > React was a tool the community loved AMP is a feature that users love. The difference between the two is that here there's a much higher ratio of developers, and most users don't realize when they are using AMP. If you gave them a comparison of a fast loading light page or not (just compare a site's page pre and post them deploying AMP capability), I'm confident this would be easily shown. There are some problems with AMP, and there are some problems with how Google utilizes it, but it does help the problem of page bloat and slow loading pages. > React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement. A lot of the complaints are about Google's control over AMP, and how they might change it in the future in directions that are harmful for the minority. This does address that somewhat. I see them as very similar. Both are projects where a large company spurred release for their own reasons, but had to make it more open to appease the public and actually get more of the adoption they wanted.
  - matthewmacleod 8y ago
    AMP is a feature that users love. AMP is almost certainly not a feature that users know about, beyond it being a bit faster and breaking stuff. I absolutely hate being taken to an AMP page instead of a web page, and worse is having no way to say to Google "please don't show me this".
    - spiritcat 8y ago
      sure ya do, use firefox
    - 8y ago
floatboth 8y ago
But it's not the AMP itself that matters — it's Google's cache/CDN thingy that only selects pages that are AMP…
- bk_avalara 8y ago
  That's absolutely true. I just found out that there are currently two AMP cache providers, Google and Cloudflare: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/how_cached https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/how_cached. For users with some objection to Google, it's not clear to me how they are supposed to change their personal AMP cache provider, like with a browser configuration setting or something. Is it Cloudflare's intention that other search engines like DDG use their AMP cache?
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    AFAIK, Bing runs an AMP cache as well. There's no such thing as a "personal AMP cache provider", as the AMP cache used is mostly tied to "where you came from". Google Search will always use Google's AMP cache, which is why the "you could always run your own AMP cache" concept is silly. The goal of AMP is functionally to allow your search engine to preload the content from search results, at it's own origin. So any AMP-enabled search engine would need to run it's own AMP cache and serve the site out of their AMP cache. AMP doesn't realistically speed up web browsing in any other context (it adds plenty of it's own JavaScript).
kodablah 8y ago
I think we can do better than AMP. How about having no Google affiliation and making it a strict subset of HTML+CSS? Those AMP tags make the likelihood of independent implementations much lower. Can we just remove client-side dynamism/interactivity from the picture at least at first or as an option? We can go a long way with pure, strict, reduced HTML+CSS (still includes HTML forms). I've been toying with this idea myself [0], but the key is strictness and complete no-runtime-needed backwards compat w/ current HTML+CSS. And for goodness sake, no proxies, pre-rendering, etc. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/92 https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/92
- mattmanser 8y ago
  Why is it needed at all? We have HTML, we have an agreed upon governance for it. Page load speeds are, frankly, none of Google's business and click jacking is a disgusting practice. It's a text book case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. All the Devs working on this project should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > Why is it needed at all? We have HTML, we have an agreed upon governance for it. For my selfish reasons, so I can write a competing browser that only accepts that format. While I want the spec smaller and more strict for selfish reasons (ease of implementation), it has bonus value for performance use cases. Also, there is value for devs to signify that they are attempting to conform to a certain specification (i.e. the purpose of a doctype). Sans validation the value is less, but still, having a simplified spec subset for web pages at least lets the community/ecosystem grow around it.
  - infogulch 8y ago
    > Page load speeds are, frankly, none of Google's business If I as a user care about page speed when choosing between search results (many do, every single amp-related thread has several, this one included), then Google cares and it is their business. If the industry were capable of making fast web pages then they'd already be doing it. Claiming that "only using some features of system X" is equivalent to "use system Y which is defined as a subset of X" because a technical comparison claims that they're the same is completely missing the mark.
tusharsoni 8y ago
Seems like they completely missed the point. They need to make search results not rely on the page using AMP but just being light and fast. If the page uses AMP to do that, great, if not, shouldn't matter.
- cramforce 8y ago
  For that aspect see https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons...
drenvuk 8y ago
Why not simply weight the search results and make an open grading project? Site loads slowly versus other sites that do similar things? Give it a C or a D instead of an A. Weight the results instead of just giving the top to amp pages. Easy.
- cramforce 8y ago
  Ranking based on speed was launched this July https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
  - drenvuk 8y ago
    Lovely, now they can get rid of AMP. It's an unwelcome distraction.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    Has the AMP-only carousel also been removed?
niftich 8y ago
This move is aimed to quell the critique based on a hypothetis that contributions to AMP that go against Google's vision would be rejected. It also is a move in good faith to transition the project's governance away from Google to a goal-oriented crew of many interested parties who can derive benefit from its solutions. I've written about AMP on here a lot [1], and frequently include this disclaimer. My views on it have evolved as time went on, being more sympathetic to some of the critiques, but also to the efforts of the AMP team to address many of the complaints. While a number of technical critiques to AMP remain, increasingly, the criticism is: - ideological (e.g. "Google is trying to destroy the open web"), - misinformed (e.g. "Google is stealing traffic from publishers"), - nihilist (e.g. "everyone who uses AMP only does so because you need it to rank high in search"), - full of naïve bravado (e.g. "all we need is clean HTML"), - or related to the fact that Google's mobile search page has stealth-morphed into a captive newsreader that surfaces AMP-ified articles with Javascript without ever leaving the page. Out of these, the lattermost is the only one that raises a true anticompetitive concern, which Google seems keen on ignoring. However, I'd say that's for the Google Search team, rather than the AMP team, to address. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat...
- lucideer 8y ago
  Of your 5 bullet points, what's the difference between #2 and #5? You say people believing #2 are misinformed, but that #5 raises a true anticompetitive concern, but they're the same thing, no? As for it being for the Google Search team to address, rather than the AMP team, I'd be inclined to disagree. AMP Cache is a part of the AMP spec., the Google Search team are just implementing it as described. What they're doing is just what the AMP Cache is designed to do, nothing more. Also, while you describe #3 as nihilist,I fear it's the most true among the wider, non-HN implementers of AMP on sites.
  - ninkendo 8y ago
    You can definitely care about #5 without caring about #2: Morphing my search results into a captive newsreader gives me a demonstrably terrible experience browsing to sites on my phone. The swipe-back gesture is broken, scrolling doesn't move the safari borders away like it's supposed to, there's a big AMP border I can't get rid of, swiping just moves between results instead of going back (or did they "fix" this?), the URL bar shows google.com instead of the site, making it harder to share, etc etc. I don't care that they're "stealing traffic", I care that my mobile experience is demonstrably worsened.
nebulous1 8y ago
When they're giving contributor statistics are they talking about commits? Looking at the commit log and contributors list on github, the vast majority of the code appears to be written by google. It looks like they're counting a user with a single commit equal alongside google developers who work on the code base every other day.
user812 8y ago
Is this Google getting desparate they will soon be seen as the monolithic behemoth they are already? AMP will definitely backfire in the hands of Google, but for an open standard the model itself shouldn't be tied to their incentives in such a drastic way. I know people in the media and publishers who despise everything AMP and would do everything to get away from Google, but they can't due to heavy inertia of creating alternatives in such a tightly controlled market dominated by a single entity that is miles ahead when it comes to resources on all levels. AMP is pursued by google to kick out competitive third parties from the mobile ecosystem, that's all. It's nothing to be proud of, and doesn't solve a problem except forcing selfish publishers to reconsider their patchwork of dozens third parties cluttering and burdening the user (nowadays consumer). A true solution is already there - it is called HTML + CSS, and if Google was honest they would simply rank via speed, which they always did. There is simply no problem. The only problem is that Google can't control the types of third party scripts running on the fastest websites, that's why they created a selfish solution to that problem. Only because something is structurally open source, doesn't make it good, and only because something is open source and structurally governed by multiple entities, doesn't make it a worthwhile endeavour. This is all about the big players controlling the narrative. Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo and eBay are not better than Google when it comes to letting them define how the web works.
Aeolun 8y ago
I don’t think this is going to affect my opinion of google one way or another, but coming so short on the heels of a bunch of controversy, I have to wonder at their motivations.
c487bd62 8y ago
Will you be able to use AMP without ever touching Google servers/services? So it actually works like said subset of HTML to clean up the mess we're in. You have to force those things directly in the core, you can already make pages fast with current tech, that's probably why they also talk about ads in the spec. At least for non-SPAs (I wouldn't complain about another layer for SPAs that cleans up the rest of the web). You can't even open most of the official AMP project pages and docs with JS disabled, that's often a red flag. I'm not really an expert on AMP, but would only support it if they actually made things better without pushing for their own services or pull things like AMP for Gmail, variations of EEE.
- Jyaif 8y ago
  > Will you be able to use AMP without ever touching Google servers/services? Well yeah, and AFAIK it was always the case. If you use Bing, you'll touch MS's AMP cache.
jorgec 8y ago
AMP is not more, it's minus. It has minus features and a minor audience so we don't need it. I added AMP for my site and my audience is not increasing but it's the opposite. So, it's not even good for SEO. Maybe it's usable for a news site.
auslander 8y ago
Found it in 2yo discussion, totally agree: The reason for AMP is surveillance capitalism. If you absolutely, positively believe you have to track your users, writing simple web pages is not an option. Your choice is either the status quo (pull in lots of third-party cruft), or having a fast-loading page where Google runs the tracking and advertising infrastructure. The docs explain that "AMP analytics is specifically designed to measure once and report to many". Google's not trying to drive out other players, they're making sure they run the table. (c) idlewords on Sept 21, 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541966
auslander 8y ago
EasyList, which most adblockers rely on, was asked to, and removed amp-analytics.js from it: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/17e0447fb7c6df377a1081f730c5039c5396d0af https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/17e0447fb7c6df37... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42907284/ublock-blocking-amp-experiment https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42907284/ublock-blocking... While they claim that it is not tracking, I call bullshit: "..integrate your service into amp-analytics.. Consider if and how you will track users across first-party and third-party AMP contexts." https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/28582dfdfb6d09f1912d5bed0657c0dd97c1593c/extensions/amp-analytics/integrating-analytics.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/28582dfdfb6d09f19... And there still be HTTP Referrer in the request: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data-leaks-by-stripping-path-information-in-http-referrers/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data...
jaredcwhite 8y ago
I will never, ever deploy AMP on my website or any website I have any control over. One poster in this thread made a dismissive statement about ideological criticism of AMP "(e.g. "Google is trying to destroy the open web")". Well, I am absolutely happy to stand by that criticism. AMP is diametrically opposed to the open web. The web is built upon three fundamental technologies, any of which—if replaced—constitute a platform OTHER than the open web: HTML/CSS, HTTP, and URI/DNS. Google seems keen on breaking down that last bit as recent updates to Chrome demonstrate, and AMP is essentially a replacement for HTML. I don't see the open web being appreciated or respected by the Google of today, and I plan to do everything in my power to stand against this shocking land grab of influence over the web not seen since the bad old days of 90s era Microsoft.
- auslander 8y ago
  > I don't see the open web being appreciated or respected by the Google of today I'd generalise it more, "I don't expect the open web being appreciated or respected by any business." Business is to make money, preferably now, open or not is irrelevant.
  - jaredcwhite 8y ago
    I hate having to think in such cynical terms, but I fear you are right.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  You should also block Cloudflare's AMP bots [1] on the websites you control and flag AMP defending and promoting articles. The sad part is it's all just the beginning. All those ad-billions will go into more land grab and control, rather than innovation and progress. And governments will be so happy about it, no need for censorship laws if you can just ask a megacorp to "moderate" content that reaches most of the population. [1] "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0; +https://amp.cloudflare.com/doc/fetcher.html https://amp.cloudflare.com/doc/fetcher.html) AppleWebKit/534.34"
- sagarm 8y ago
  Angular allows you to create your own HTML elements that cannot be used without the Javascript accompanying the page. That seems similar to AMP to me: AMP is a (very) opinionated framework that provides a set of HTML elements. It can run in any browser.[1] Like Angular, AMP is a Google project. Why does your criticism of AMP ("replacement of HTML" "shocking land grab of influence") not also apply to Angular? Maybe your objection is more about the CDN or presentation in Google search? I'm genuinely confused by the strong reaction AMP seems to elicit. [1] https://www.ampproject.org/support/faqs/supported-browsers https://www.ampproject.org/support/faqs/supported-browsers
michelb 8y ago
The secret to getting rid of AMP may be to actually adopt it, and be happy about it. That way Google will end-of-life it soon.
justtopost 8y ago
I am agast at the comment section here. The number of people seemingly purposly misunderstanding or misrepresenting a rather simple issue is disheartening. I know talk of shills is frowned upon here, but you can't really ignore it in threads like these. What is the HN approved way to call these, often high ranking, accounts out? I don't want to rock boats but this is absurd.
- grzm 8y ago
  From the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > "Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data." You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Fair enough. But the nature of the beast makes a semi-well thought out promotion and/or suppression campaign rather hard to pin down in concrete terms. Perhaps just a loyal fanbase or independent employee or 2 is responsible, but I cant exactly sumbit a smoking gun now can I? This whole policy seems rife for abuse. But I honestly don't know a better way, without introducing adjunt issues. My sincere apologies if I reduced the quality of discourse as implied in the guidelines.

80 points by baldfat 8y ago

Google AMP was never great as a standard. It's too fuzzy and random and nobody _really_ cares about it beyond the search ranking benefits. I understand where they were coming from, but creating a reduced-interaction, faster-loading HTML subset would require way more spec work than they put in to be self-consistent and long-term maintainable. This is the same sort of reason PNaCl didn't get traction. Both were great science projects, but neither was appropriate as a long-term standard. Hopefully we'll see the WebAssembly equivalent to AMP from the ashes of that project.

cramforce 8y ago
There is a lot of movement in that direction. This was the start https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons...

sam0x17 8y ago

Now they just need to move it to the trash bin. Edit: The whole point of AMP is so Google can gain more influence and lock out competitors in the search space. The original article said they have decided to "move AMP into open governance". It is therefore hilarious (and substantive) to say they should "move it into the trash".

dang 8y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Also: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 8y ago
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- deleted 8y ago
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- sam0x17 8y ago
  Note: you guys should really get admin badges for actual HN admins. I thought this was some rando pedantically quoting the rules (and/or an actual Google shill) in response to what would be a straightforward typical comment on any other tech news platform. That said this has seriously shaken my confidence in the quality of discourse on HN and ruined my day. I miss slashdot.
  - Bjartr 8y ago
    (I had a nice long thought-out response for you until a windows update popup appeared mid-sentence, and I accidentally triggered it. Maybe I'll write it all out again later, maybe not. What I write now is a much condensed version) > you guys should really get admin badges for actual HN admins. That might be a good idea > straightforward typical comment on any other tech news platform I visit HN explicitly because it's not a typical tech news platform and isn't full of those typical comments. > It is therefore hilarious (and substantive) hilarious != substantive It was a shallow dismissal, however you slice it. Such comments are not welcome on HN. Please don't post them. > What's so hypocritical about you guys is you upvoted it until dang commented. Upvotes are not king here. Just because people upvoted it does not mean it was a good comment. > That said this has seriously shaken my confidence in the quality of discourse on HN and ruined my day. I am confused that how your comment fared in upvotes somehow has something to do with the quality of discourse on HN. There was no discourse. The fact that you got upvotes but no responses means that despite the fact people engaged with your comment, they didn't discuss anything. There was no discourse. (until my own attempt at a meta-response) And yes, believe it or not, all that is still shorter than what I originally wrote.
    - sam0x17 8y ago
      > I am confused that how your comment fared in upvotes somehow has something to do with the quality of discourse on HN. There was no discourse. The fact that you got upvotes but no responses means that despite the fact people engaged with your comment, they didn't discuss anything. There was no discourse. (until my own attempt at a meta-response) Nothing to do with the upvotes, but you feeling the need to chime in and police.
deleted 8y ago
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joemaller1 8y ago

This doesn't change the bad smell. AMP feels like it's being forced on us to appease Google so sites will appear in search rankings. The kerfuffle over React's licensing was different. React was a tool the community loved that was hamstrung by a license and opaque ties to Facebook. React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement. One possible upside, this should provide some long-term stability -- something Google is generally not good at.

kbenson 8y ago
> React was a tool the community loved AMP is a feature that users love. The difference between the two is that here there's a much higher ratio of developers, and most users don't realize when they are using AMP. If you gave them a comparison of a fast loading light page or not (just compare a site's page pre and post them deploying AMP capability), I'm confident this would be easily shown. There are some problems with AMP, and there are some problems with how Google utilizes it, but it does help the problem of page bloat and slow loading pages. > React's licensing switch was a liberation, this feels like appeasement. A lot of the complaints are about Google's control over AMP, and how they might change it in the future in directions that are harmful for the minority. This does address that somewhat. I see them as very similar. Both are projects where a large company spurred release for their own reasons, but had to make it more open to appease the public and actually get more of the adoption they wanted.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  AMP is a feature that users love. AMP is almost certainly not a feature that users know about, beyond it being a bit faster and breaking stuff. I absolutely hate being taken to an AMP page instead of a web page, and worse is having no way to say to Google "please don't show me this".
  - spiritcat 8y ago
    sure ya do, use firefox
  - 8y ago

floatboth 8y ago

But it's not the AMP itself that matters — it's Google's cache/CDN thingy that only selects pages that are AMP…

bk_avalara 8y ago
That's absolutely true. I just found out that there are currently two AMP cache providers, Google and Cloudflare: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/how_cached https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/how_cached. For users with some objection to Google, it's not clear to me how they are supposed to change their personal AMP cache provider, like with a browser configuration setting or something. Is it Cloudflare's intention that other search engines like DDG use their AMP cache?
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  AFAIK, Bing runs an AMP cache as well. There's no such thing as a "personal AMP cache provider", as the AMP cache used is mostly tied to "where you came from". Google Search will always use Google's AMP cache, which is why the "you could always run your own AMP cache" concept is silly. The goal of AMP is functionally to allow your search engine to preload the content from search results, at it's own origin. So any AMP-enabled search engine would need to run it's own AMP cache and serve the site out of their AMP cache. AMP doesn't realistically speed up web browsing in any other context (it adds plenty of it's own JavaScript).

kodablah 8y ago

I think we can do better than AMP. How about having no Google affiliation and making it a strict subset of HTML+CSS? Those AMP tags make the likelihood of independent implementations much lower. Can we just remove client-side dynamism/interactivity from the picture at least at first or as an option? We can go a long way with pure, strict, reduced HTML+CSS (still includes HTML forms). I've been toying with this idea myself [0], but the key is strictness and complete no-runtime-needed backwards compat w/ current HTML+CSS. And for goodness sake, no proxies, pre-rendering, etc. 0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/92 https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/92

mattmanser 8y ago
Why is it needed at all? We have HTML, we have an agreed upon governance for it. Page load speeds are, frankly, none of Google's business and click jacking is a disgusting practice. It's a text book case of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. All the Devs working on this project should be deeply ashamed of themselves.
- kodablah 8y ago
  > Why is it needed at all? We have HTML, we have an agreed upon governance for it. For my selfish reasons, so I can write a competing browser that only accepts that format. While I want the spec smaller and more strict for selfish reasons (ease of implementation), it has bonus value for performance use cases. Also, there is value for devs to signify that they are attempting to conform to a certain specification (i.e. the purpose of a doctype). Sans validation the value is less, but still, having a simplified spec subset for web pages at least lets the community/ecosystem grow around it.
- infogulch 8y ago
  > Page load speeds are, frankly, none of Google's business If I as a user care about page speed when choosing between search results (many do, every single amp-related thread has several, this one included), then Google cares and it is their business. If the industry were capable of making fast web pages then they'd already be doing it. Claiming that "only using some features of system X" is equivalent to "use system Y which is defined as a subset of X" because a technical comparison claims that they're the same is completely missing the mark.

tusharsoni 8y ago

Seems like they completely missed the point. They need to make search results not rely on the page using AMP but just being light and fast. If the page uses AMP to do that, great, if not, shouldn't matter.

cramforce 8y ago
For that aspect see https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons-learned-from-amp/ https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/standardizing-lessons...

drenvuk 8y ago

Why not simply weight the search results and make an open grading project? Site loads slowly versus other sites that do similar things? Give it a C or a D instead of an A. Weight the results instead of just giving the top to amp pages. Easy.

cramforce 8y ago
Ranking based on speed was launched this July https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-i...
- drenvuk 8y ago
  Lovely, now they can get rid of AMP. It's an unwelcome distraction.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Has the AMP-only carousel also been removed?

niftich 8y ago

This move is aimed to quell the critique based on a hypothetis that contributions to AMP that go against Google's vision would be rejected. It also is a move in good faith to transition the project's governance away from Google to a goal-oriented crew of many interested parties who can derive benefit from its solutions. I've written about AMP on here a lot [1], and frequently include this disclaimer. My views on it have evolved as time went on, being more sympathetic to some of the critiques, but also to the efforts of the AMP team to address many of the complaints. While a number of technical critiques to AMP remain, increasingly, the criticism is: - ideological (e.g. "Google is trying to destroy the open web"), - misinformed (e.g. "Google is stealing traffic from publishers"), - nihilist (e.g. "everyone who uses AMP only does so because you need it to rank high in search"), - full of naïve bravado (e.g. "all we need is clean HTML"), - or related to the fact that Google's mobile search page has stealth-morphed into a captive newsreader that surfaces AMP-ified articles with Javascript without ever leaving the page. Out of these, the lattermost is the only one that raises a true anticompetitive concern, which Google seems keen on ignoring. However, I'd say that's for the Google Search team, rather than the AMP team, to address. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat...

lucideer 8y ago
Of your 5 bullet points, what's the difference between #2 and #5? You say people believing #2 are misinformed, but that #5 raises a true anticompetitive concern, but they're the same thing, no? As for it being for the Google Search team to address, rather than the AMP team, I'd be inclined to disagree. AMP Cache is a part of the AMP spec., the Google Search team are just implementing it as described. What they're doing is just what the AMP Cache is designed to do, nothing more. Also, while you describe #3 as nihilist,I fear it's the most true among the wider, non-HN implementers of AMP on sites.
- ninkendo 8y ago
  You can definitely care about #5 without caring about #2: Morphing my search results into a captive newsreader gives me a demonstrably terrible experience browsing to sites on my phone. The swipe-back gesture is broken, scrolling doesn't move the safari borders away like it's supposed to, there's a big AMP border I can't get rid of, swiping just moves between results instead of going back (or did they "fix" this?), the URL bar shows google.com instead of the site, making it harder to share, etc etc. I don't care that they're "stealing traffic", I care that my mobile experience is demonstrably worsened.

nebulous1 8y ago

When they're giving contributor statistics are they talking about commits? Looking at the commit log and contributors list on github, the vast majority of the code appears to be written by google. It looks like they're counting a user with a single commit equal alongside google developers who work on the code base every other day.

user812 8y ago

Is this Google getting desparate they will soon be seen as the monolithic behemoth they are already? AMP will definitely backfire in the hands of Google, but for an open standard the model itself shouldn't be tied to their incentives in such a drastic way. I know people in the media and publishers who despise everything AMP and would do everything to get away from Google, but they can't due to heavy inertia of creating alternatives in such a tightly controlled market dominated by a single entity that is miles ahead when it comes to resources on all levels. AMP is pursued by google to kick out competitive third parties from the mobile ecosystem, that's all. It's nothing to be proud of, and doesn't solve a problem except forcing selfish publishers to reconsider their patchwork of dozens third parties cluttering and burdening the user (nowadays consumer). A true solution is already there - it is called HTML + CSS, and if Google was honest they would simply rank via speed, which they always did. There is simply no problem. The only problem is that Google can't control the types of third party scripts running on the fastest websites, that's why they created a selfish solution to that problem. Only because something is structurally open source, doesn't make it good, and only because something is open source and structurally governed by multiple entities, doesn't make it a worthwhile endeavour. This is all about the big players controlling the narrative. Twitter, Pinterest, Yahoo and eBay are not better than Google when it comes to letting them define how the web works.

Aeolun 8y ago

I don’t think this is going to affect my opinion of google one way or another, but coming so short on the heels of a bunch of controversy, I have to wonder at their motivations.

c487bd62 8y ago

Will you be able to use AMP without ever touching Google servers/services? So it actually works like said subset of HTML to clean up the mess we're in. You have to force those things directly in the core, you can already make pages fast with current tech, that's probably why they also talk about ads in the spec. At least for non-SPAs (I wouldn't complain about another layer for SPAs that cleans up the rest of the web). You can't even open most of the official AMP project pages and docs with JS disabled, that's often a red flag. I'm not really an expert on AMP, but would only support it if they actually made things better without pushing for their own services or pull things like AMP for Gmail, variations of EEE.

Jyaif 8y ago
> Will you be able to use AMP without ever touching Google servers/services? Well yeah, and AFAIK it was always the case. If you use Bing, you'll touch MS's AMP cache.

jorgec 8y ago

AMP is not more, it's minus. It has minus features and a minor audience so we don't need it. I added AMP for my site and my audience is not increasing but it's the opposite. So, it's not even good for SEO. Maybe it's usable for a news site.

auslander 8y ago

Found it in 2yo discussion, totally agree: The reason for AMP is surveillance capitalism. If you absolutely, positively believe you have to track your users, writing simple web pages is not an option. Your choice is either the status quo (pull in lots of third-party cruft), or having a fast-loading page where Google runs the tracking and advertising infrastructure. The docs explain that "AMP analytics is specifically designed to measure once and report to many". Google's not trying to drive out other players, they're making sure they run the table. (c) idlewords on Sept 21, 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12541966

auslander 8y ago

EasyList, which most adblockers rely on, was asked to, and removed amp-analytics.js from it: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/17e0447fb7c6df377a1081f730c5039c5396d0af https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/17e0447fb7c6df37... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42907284/ublock-blocking-amp-experiment https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42907284/ublock-blocking... While they claim that it is not tracking, I call bullshit: "..integrate your service into amp-analytics.. Consider if and how you will track users across first-party and third-party AMP contexts." https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/28582dfdfb6d09f1912d5bed0657c0dd97c1593c/extensions/amp-analytics/integrating-analytics.md https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/28582dfdfb6d09f19... And there still be HTTP Referrer in the request: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data-leaks-by-stripping-path-information-in-http-referrers/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/31/preventing-data...

jaredcwhite 8y ago

I will never, ever deploy AMP on my website or any website I have any control over. One poster in this thread made a dismissive statement about ideological criticism of AMP "(e.g. "Google is trying to destroy the open web")". Well, I am absolutely happy to stand by that criticism. AMP is diametrically opposed to the open web. The web is built upon three fundamental technologies, any of which—if replaced—constitute a platform OTHER than the open web: HTML/CSS, HTTP, and URI/DNS. Google seems keen on breaking down that last bit as recent updates to Chrome demonstrate, and AMP is essentially a replacement for HTML. I don't see the open web being appreciated or respected by the Google of today, and I plan to do everything in my power to stand against this shocking land grab of influence over the web not seen since the bad old days of 90s era Microsoft.

auslander 8y ago
> I don't see the open web being appreciated or respected by the Google of today I'd generalise it more, "I don't expect the open web being appreciated or respected by any business." Business is to make money, preferably now, open or not is irrelevant.
- jaredcwhite 8y ago
  I hate having to think in such cynical terms, but I fear you are right.
zzzcpan 8y ago
You should also block Cloudflare's AMP bots [1] on the websites you control and flag AMP defending and promoting articles. The sad part is it's all just the beginning. All those ad-billions will go into more land grab and control, rather than innovation and progress. And governments will be so happy about it, no need for censorship laws if you can just ask a megacorp to "moderate" content that reaches most of the population. [1] "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Cloudflare-AMP/1.0; +https://amp.cloudflare.com/doc/fetcher.html https://amp.cloudflare.com/doc/fetcher.html) AppleWebKit/534.34"
sagarm 8y ago
Angular allows you to create your own HTML elements that cannot be used without the Javascript accompanying the page. That seems similar to AMP to me: AMP is a (very) opinionated framework that provides a set of HTML elements. It can run in any browser.[1] Like Angular, AMP is a Google project. Why does your criticism of AMP ("replacement of HTML" "shocking land grab of influence") not also apply to Angular? Maybe your objection is more about the CDN or presentation in Google search? I'm genuinely confused by the strong reaction AMP seems to elicit. [1] https://www.ampproject.org/support/faqs/supported-browsers https://www.ampproject.org/support/faqs/supported-browsers

michelb 8y ago

The secret to getting rid of AMP may be to actually adopt it, and be happy about it. That way Google will end-of-life it soon.

justtopost 8y ago

I am agast at the comment section here. The number of people seemingly purposly misunderstanding or misrepresenting a rather simple issue is disheartening. I know talk of shills is frowned upon here, but you can't really ignore it in threads like these. What is the HN approved way to call these, often high ranking, accounts out? I don't want to rock boats but this is absurd.

grzm 8y ago
From the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > "Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data." You can contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Fair enough. But the nature of the beast makes a semi-well thought out promotion and/or suppression campaign rather hard to pin down in concrete terms. Perhaps just a loyal fanbase or independent employee or 2 is responsible, but I cant exactly sumbit a smoking gun now can I? This whole policy seems rife for abuse. But I honestly don't know a better way, without introducing adjunt issues. My sincere apologies if I reduced the quality of discourse as implied in the guidelines.