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> make AMP a great web citizen Why isn't AMP a great web citizen? As far as I can tell, it's just a web component framework. Google took a very unique approach

by jart 6y ago

> make AMP a great web citizen Why isn't AMP a great web citizen? As far as I can tell, it's just a web component framework. Google took a very unique approach in inventing web components. Most people who invent web frameworks just put them out there as their own arbitrary unilateral design like Django, React, etc. and if enough people sign on board it's a thing. Web components was the one time when someone who wanted a new framework, actually put the time and effort into attracting the involvement of the browser authors and web consortium and standards bodies. That's a real long road and it's incredibly hard. Google did that. It's something worth respecting, even if web components don't feel all the great to code. Beyond being a web component framework, I have no idea who the hell these AMP people are, and why they're forming consensus committees acting like they're steering the future of the Internet. We can see how quickly that fell apart into public metadrama the moment they lost their big stick SEO, since IIRC Google recently stopped explicitly favoring AMP results. If Google was smart, they would have invented an algorithm that can tell "your website is a slow bloated popup laden piece of crap" and we're going to officially demote your SEO because of that. If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites like NYTimes, then the mobile web would instantly transform itself overnight. And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked. > Google’s thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps And I'm still sitting here spending most of my time in a terminal. What is dead may never die. If the mobile web dies then Google only has its own stewardship to blame. Google once understood that its interests were tied with the success of the open web and I'm sorry but they surely didn't think that a horse which died due to their policies would come back to life if they moved its corpse out of the barnyard and into a closed barn? Since that's basically how all this comes across.

Veen 6y ago
> If Google was smart, they would have invented an algorithm that can tell "your website is a slow bloated popup laden piece of crap" and we're going to officially demote your SEO because of that. Google does exactly that, which is one reason so many publishers were tempted to adopt AMP. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads... However, sometimes a slow site is still the best site for a particular query. There are multiple factors to consider when ranking pages. > If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites Again, Google already penalizes sites for popups and interstitials. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/08/helping-us... > And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked. That was the reason Google ostensibly introducted AMP in the first place. Unfortunately, it also breaks a lot of standard web interactions and forces publishers to cache content on Google infrastructure. Looking at your comparison of AMP with React, it's safe to say you are a little bit confused about what it is.
- jart 6y ago
  I explicitly said I have no idea how AMP isn't a web framework. Are you saying that it's a CDN too? If that's problematic then fork the web framework code on GitHub and replace GCS with your own thing to make a buck. The root problem is search engine ranking policies. Frameworks can't fix that systemically. If Google was actually downranking websites that go too far with bloat and popups then people wouldn't do it. It's not complicated. What frameworks actually do is help you "check off a box" for misguided views Google holds about things like mobile friendliness, which punish small web sites, and favor big bloated complicated ones that can afford to devote engineers to sitting around checking off boxes.
  - MrStonedOne 6y ago
    its a cdn first and a framework second. The whole point of amp was suppose to be that google could host the amp'ed pages on their servers. They claim that by hosting it on their servers they can prefetch it from search results (they could otherwise, but it would expose details about the user and their searches to sites the user never ended up visiting) and that this would make it faster. in practice this rarely leads to more then low 2 digit MS improvements over normal because the cache servers are so overloaded dealing with all the prefetch queries. Googles CDN is not what it used to be and i've even taken the step of moving my google fonts off of google and on to my cloudflare'ed domain for my 70mil/ppm website because it made things faster.
  - pas 6y ago
    AMP is a framework, but Google provides caching for AMP results. Basically it serves them from its search index. And people scream about this vertical integration.
MrStonedOne 6y ago
AMP does not fit all types of content, so prioritizing it over non-AMP pages penalizes websites that don't make static content or forces them to make all searches a landing page in AMP to the actual page, making shit even more of a mess on the web. AMP Forces publishers to put their content on googles servers giving google more data about users (that it doesn't share with the publisher) and its the equivalent of a yellow pages phone book provider making the text of all companies smaller unless the company gives yellow pages exclusive access to their front door security camera. Don't defend it. When yelp started replacing the phone number of restaurants with their yelp delivery service partner's phone number to intercept the sales and use their own provider, everybody on hackernews rightly called it out as shit, but when google does the same shit its "not everybody's cup of tea". No, you can't divorce AMP from how Google uses AMP. Google made AMP and Google shaped the core foundations of AMP that lets them do this. You can't just hand wave that away.
npunt 6y ago
> Why isn't AMP a great web citizen? As far as I can tell, it's just a web component framework. To be a good citizen of anything implies an awareness of a broader context, as well as actions and intentions within that context that create benefit to others. By saying it's 'just a web component framework' you're completely divorcing the technology from its context, which is that AMP was part of a strategy to annex part of the open web by acting as a gatekeeper between users and publishers.

by jart 6y ago

Veen 6y ago

> If Google was smart, they would have invented an algorithm that can tell "your website is a slow bloated popup laden piece of crap" and we're going to officially demote your SEO because of that. Google does exactly that, which is one reason so many publishers were tempted to adopt AMP. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads... However, sometimes a slow site is still the best site for a particular query. There are multiple factors to consider when ranking pages. > If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites Again, Google already penalizes sites for popups and interstitials. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/08/helping-us... > And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked. That was the reason Google ostensibly introducted AMP in the first place. Unfortunately, it also breaks a lot of standard web interactions and forces publishers to cache content on Google infrastructure. Looking at your comparison of AMP with React, it's safe to say you are a little bit confused about what it is.

jart 6y ago
I explicitly said I have no idea how AMP isn't a web framework. Are you saying that it's a CDN too? If that's problematic then fork the web framework code on GitHub and replace GCS with your own thing to make a buck. The root problem is search engine ranking policies. Frameworks can't fix that systemically. If Google was actually downranking websites that go too far with bloat and popups then people wouldn't do it. It's not complicated. What frameworks actually do is help you "check off a box" for misguided views Google holds about things like mobile friendliness, which punish small web sites, and favor big bloated complicated ones that can afford to devote engineers to sitting around checking off boxes.
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  its a cdn first and a framework second. The whole point of amp was suppose to be that google could host the amp'ed pages on their servers. They claim that by hosting it on their servers they can prefetch it from search results (they could otherwise, but it would expose details about the user and their searches to sites the user never ended up visiting) and that this would make it faster. in practice this rarely leads to more then low 2 digit MS improvements over normal because the cache servers are so overloaded dealing with all the prefetch queries. Googles CDN is not what it used to be and i've even taken the step of moving my google fonts off of google and on to my cloudflare'ed domain for my 70mil/ppm website because it made things faster.
- pas 6y ago
  AMP is a framework, but Google provides caching for AMP results. Basically it serves them from its search index. And people scream about this vertical integration.

MrStonedOne 6y ago

AMP does not fit all types of content, so prioritizing it over non-AMP pages penalizes websites that don't make static content or forces them to make all searches a landing page in AMP to the actual page, making shit even more of a mess on the web. AMP Forces publishers to put their content on googles servers giving google more data about users (that it doesn't share with the publisher) and its the equivalent of a yellow pages phone book provider making the text of all companies smaller unless the company gives yellow pages exclusive access to their front door security camera. Don't defend it. When yelp started replacing the phone number of restaurants with their yelp delivery service partner's phone number to intercept the sales and use their own provider, everybody on hackernews rightly called it out as shit, but when google does the same shit its "not everybody's cup of tea". No, you can't divorce AMP from how Google uses AMP. Google made AMP and Google shaped the core foundations of AMP that lets them do this. You can't just hand wave that away.

npunt 6y ago

> Why isn't AMP a great web citizen? As far as I can tell, it's just a web component framework. To be a good citizen of anything implies an awareness of a broader context, as well as actions and intentions within that context that create benefit to others. By saying it's 'just a web component framework' you're completely divorcing the technology from its context, which is that AMP was part of a strategy to annex part of the open web by acting as a gatekeeper between users and publishers.