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While I agree with this article's conclusion, I think it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power) with technical concerns. F
by room271 1y ago
While I agree with this article's conclusion, I think it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power) with technical concerns.
For a time, I tech-led the creation of the AMP site for a major news publisher. The technical choices of AMP, excluding the CDN-aspect, are I think a great fit for publishing websites with tens-hundreds of developers who are all tempted to write bespoke JS and in so doing create performance and maintenance hell. In many respects, philosophically, I think AMP was not far of HTMX. In AMP, developers are able to construct relatively sophisticated dynamic/interactive features using simple markup (and pre-built JS components). The page is managed through a single JS runtime which helps manage performance issues. As components have a standard HTML interface, it is possible to migrate the backend to different rendering technologies partially over time unlike (for example), isomorphic JS which forces a large-scale rewrite down the line.
I tried to advocate for an in-house AMP-like solution for our main website, but it was ultimately re-written in React -- a process which took several years and resulted in a codebase of much greater complexity. (Performance was better than the old website but I'm not sure React really contributed to the gains here.)
While AMP is rightly dead, I think the technical choices it made live on (or at least, they should).
- trollbridge 1y agoAMP seemed like a great technology that ended up being used for user-hostile purposes.
- Henchman21 1y agoIf you swap out AMP for ${generic_tech} this statement seems to describe the latest 15 years of software development.
- throwaway28692 1y agoIt was never user-hostile. It was definitely publisher hostile but that isn't the same thing.
- dbbk 1y agoOf course it was user-hostile. I can't tell you how many times I would get linked to an AMP version of a page on desktop, with text spanning the entire width of the screen, and no way to get back to the 'normal' version.
- MaxBarraclough 1y agoPerhaps I'm just being dense, but I really don't see the point of AMP. If you want to build a non-bloated website, you don't need special branding from Google to do so, you just need to care about the quality of your work. Websites like HackerNews, SourceHut, and Pinboard, are living proof. The Wikipedia article does a very poor job, in my opinion, of explaining what AMP even is. [0] It emphasises use of CDN caching to improve performance, but this can be done for any static website. What does AMP contribute? Where's the innovation? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
- jeffbee 1y agoAMP is a set of rules for people who are unable to stop themselves from making bad decisions. It has nothing to do with technical superiority. AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking. There is nothing that stops you from creating an AMP-like experience if you are naturally not a jackass.
- bayindirh 1y ago> AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking. You mean, jackassery like, not running ads from Google's ad platform(s)?
- EvanAnderson 1y ago> ...it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power)... It never occurred to me that AMP is an initialism for "Abuse of Monopoly Power". It's deliciously fitting.
- BiteCode_dev 1y agoIt's "accelerated mobile pages" but I love the abuse version.
- marcellus23 1y agoWell yes, obviously Google didn't actually name it for Abuse of Monopoly Power.
- ceejayoz 1y agoNot publicly, at least. They've put some seriously dumb admissions in writing before. https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-steve-jobs https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-ste...
- Lammy 1y agoThey learned from this and now just have periodic arbitrary layoffs to depress salaries and keep the workers scared and in line in a deniable way instead of in an explicit way.
- no_wizard 1y agoI like AMP conceptually, would make a good app platform for alot of types of websites and such. I wish it was easier to fork, honestly. There's some good ideas within, though some questionable choices as well. Unfortunately the project is rather opaque in a number of ways
- lern_too_spel 1y agoHow would forking work? The whole point of AMP is that a cache can validate that it is safe to prerender. If you added your own stuff, the caches would just reject it.
- room271 1y agoAMP is both a Javascript framework, and a wider page contract that facilitates CDN inclusion. I believe the parent is referring to the Javascript framework, which itself has many nice properties for interactivity and performance.
- no_wizard 1y agoYea and I will say I don’t think it would be terribly hard replicate the benefits of the CDN on something like Cloudflare Workers
- lern_too_spel 1y agoThe point of AMP is that the link aggregator owns the cache, not the publisher. You would have to convince Google, Bing, and all the other link aggregators to use your implementation for their AMP caches. That's why it has a standards body. If you don't understand why, you don't understand the problem that AMP solves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733809
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoYeah, while I basically loathed AMP for all the control and monopolization issues, I do see what Google was trying to accomplish, at least at first. Any front end dev has had to deal with the onslaught of asks from various marketing and sales teams: "Can you add this tag library?", "We need to integrate this affiliate broker!", etc. etc. And lots of devs would push back with stuff like "At this point we load 247 3rd party tags and JS libraries and it takes 53 seconds for our page to load, we have to stop this madness!" but the problem was that for any individual marketing team ask, the impact was small and of course that team had some KPIs to hit this quarter. It was basically a sort of Tragedy of the Commons situation. So AMP came along and essentially gave front-end devs a technical reason why they couldn't add some shitty, slow, buggy affiliate broker JS library to the code base, so when marketing came with an ask, they could simply say "Sorry, not supported in AMP, and without AMP we get downranked in Google". AMP essentially became a technical hack to align short term incentives ("We need to add some marketing feature X!") with longer term goals of faster, lighter-weight pages.
- thehappypm 1y agoYep. I totally see why they did it. It’s a user focus, not developer focus. Users just want faster webpages. The end.
- charcircuit 1y ago>without AMP we get downranked in Google Whether a site used AMP did not affect ranking in Google.
- wombatpm 1y agoRanking is a closely held secret. Non AMP COULD have a negative impact. Let marketing try and get confirmation from Google that it does not.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoYou're either uninformed or splitting hairs about what "downranked" means. Google required AMP in order to be featured in the "Top Stories" carousel that was (unsurprisingly) at the top of the results page. Google ended this requirement in mid 2021, https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_vitals/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_v...
- Eric_WVGG 1y agoAMP is a misplaced principle, because it says “due to the constraints of mobile, web pages should be lightweight, not overdo it on interactivity, and load fast." Instead they should have said, "Web pages should be lightweight not overdo it on interactivity, and load fast."