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I don't mean to defend Facebook but Instant Articles is based on RSS... hardly a walled gardern. On the other end, AMP is (yet another) re-invention of the wheel from Google.

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Technologically it's not a walled garden, but "business wise" - for lack of a better word- it is definitely a way to improve content consumption experience on Facebook, not for the general Internet at large.

AMP is just HTML.

But it's not, really. It's HTML + a mandatory web components polyfill and standard library loaded from a remote origin. If I just rendered the HTML, I wouldn't see any images or videos, because they're hidden behind custom <amp-img> and <amp-video> tags.

I guess the upside is that I also wouldn't see content in the <amp-ad> or <amp-pixel> elements.

I wouldn't disagree with AMP being "just web technologies," but it's sure as hell not "just HTML."

OK "just web technologies". I stopped seeing HTML as just the markup language, but I'm fine with people liking that distinction!

Well, if it was... why would you re-invent it under a new name? HTML already exists and is pretty great!

AMP is two things: Technology and a strategy to adoption. The latter was missing so far or load times wouldn't have been as bad as they were.

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