3 ms·

What bothers me about this argument is that there are plenty of other ways to make a news site fast...like just using straight static html content and minimizin

What bothers me about this argument is that there are plenty of other ways to make a news site fast...like just using straight static html content and minimizing JS usage. See http://text.npr.org http://text.npr.org or http://lite.cnn.io http://lite.cnn.io for example

SimeVidas 8y ago
Do you really think that websites can “just minimize JS usage” without consequences? For example, AMP provides an ad component that is probably the by far most performant way to display ads on the web. Without AMP, the site has to use alternative ad solutions, which probably perform worse and load more JS. The only way for the site to reduce JS would be to find an ad solution that is similar to AMP in terms of performance, and I fear such a solution just doesn’t exist.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  By ads you mean tracking. Simple ads can be served statically without JS.
  - jefftk 8y ago
    Have you tried to do this? At any substantial volume? If you serve ads completely statically you're going to have massive fraud issues. Distinguishing real views or clicks from fake ones is an arms race, and it's one you have no hope of winning without JS. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, but I don't know much about how our spam detection works and I couldn't talk about it if I did.)
- hedora 8y ago
  They could have fixed this in a heartbeat by simply having pagerank penalize pages for adding external JS assets. No AMP needed; better experience all around, and with less effort.
  - LordDragonfang 8y ago
    That just leads to every page on the web hosting its own copy of jQuery. The whole purpose of external JS is to reduce load times by sharing cacheable libraries (admittedly with the side benefit of less bandwidth for the host). And if you think a whitelist would work, all it takes is one look at how rapidly new JS libraries come and go to render that unfeasible
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - anticensor 8y ago
      You would use content names rather than location-based identifiers in that case.
      - TFortunato 8y ago
        It would be really nice if we started using URIs / URNs more instead of URLs for everything, and did a better job of separating "what" from "where"

SimeVidas 8y ago

Do you really think that websites can “just minimize JS usage” without consequences? For example, AMP provides an ad component that is probably the by far most performant way to display ads on the web. Without AMP, the site has to use alternative ad solutions, which probably perform worse and load more JS. The only way for the site to reduce JS would be to find an ad solution that is similar to AMP in terms of performance, and I fear such a solution just doesn’t exist.

mr_toad 8y ago
By ads you mean tracking. Simple ads can be served statically without JS.
- jefftk 8y ago
  Have you tried to do this? At any substantial volume? If you serve ads completely statically you're going to have massive fraud issues. Distinguishing real views or clicks from fake ones is an arms race, and it's one you have no hope of winning without JS. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, but I don't know much about how our spam detection works and I couldn't talk about it if I did.)
hedora 8y ago
They could have fixed this in a heartbeat by simply having pagerank penalize pages for adding external JS assets. No AMP needed; better experience all around, and with less effort.
- LordDragonfang 8y ago
  That just leads to every page on the web hosting its own copy of jQuery. The whole purpose of external JS is to reduce load times by sharing cacheable libraries (admittedly with the side benefit of less bandwidth for the host). And if you think a whitelist would work, all it takes is one look at how rapidly new JS libraries come and go to render that unfeasible
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - anticensor 8y ago
    You would use content names rather than location-based identifiers in that case.
    - TFortunato 8y ago
      It would be really nice if we started using URIs / URNs more instead of URLs for everything, and did a better job of separating "what" from "where"