I'm not asking cynically, and following it up with "oh, they should just do x instead".... I legitimately do not understand what's going on here. What's the added functionality? I read the article twice, I don't get it. I'm going through the spec, I don't get it. I looked at the article source, I really don't get it, it's just html and common sense.
The problem we are solving is that many sites don't.
Forgive the skepticism but this screams XKCD927.
With general web content prerendering is pretty dangerous and you certainly cannot do it with say more than 1 doc at a time because it may use arbitrary bandwidth and CPU.
That allows for instant feeling loading of pages (because they are already loaded when the user clicks) which in turn makes users happy :) While all web pages can be fast, AMP allows proving that they are which makes such a feature possible.
A referrer like Twitter or Pinterest or Google could e.g. indicate: Clicks on these links will be super fast (because they are AMP docs). If users click them more (because they like fast) there is a strong incentive for everyone to be fast – and then we all win.
I don't think XKCD927 applies, because we only combine existing standards and restrict ourselves voluntarily to a subset of those. Its still just HTML, CSS, JS. Browsers do not need to change. 't
You also didn't address my first point: If you're building this for people who don't make the effort right now, why would they suddenly make a seemingly bigger effort to support something they haven't even heard of before today?
We use amp-img instead of the img tag to be able to control when resources load (read not load them unless actually needed). Doing this with a different hack like <img data-src="foo"> is possible but a less explicit hack.
To your first point: It might have been just the right point in time, but maybe it isn't. I argue that if adoption is good users will win. It could totally fail, but then it was still worth trying.
In case you haven't tried, check out this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2_lAEzmOPo&feature=youtu.be I so much want my experience to be like that (or try g.co/ampdemo on your phone yourself).
Like someone else said: If Google wants performance, Google can start aggressively penalizing article-type websites which make unnecessary requests etc. I know you guys already penalize slow sites, so what's wrong with that approach? Especially since such an approach has a much higher chance of actually working.
But I like to present both a solution "this is how you make it fast" as well as the penalty.
If you only take AMP as a guide or tutorial that puts current best practices in a neat package that is fine with me. We are totally not claiming to have invented a new wheel.
Browsers could do what AMP does (e.g. super lazy prerendering) but I'm an impatient person and I don't like waiting for what a browser with a yearly release cycle might do.
In the world of the web platform it doesn't get much more standard than that.
Which begs the questions: Who prerenders and on what criteria?
Assume page A which has a link to AMP-forked page B.
Does that link need rel=prerender for every browser? Does one need to query the AMP-ness of every page one links to? Does one need to be Googles page cache to link to AMP-pages and get in the benefit of prerendering?
Or is the prerendering implemented in the AMP runtime? Does it only work if page A and page B are both AMP-enhanced?
They deliver all the amp-ads via that single piece of js, and will share some of the revenue with the publishers. It's not a bad idea after all, if only they had presented it for what it is: a Google fork of the Web. The "performance story" is just the bullshit.
I think it's nothing so sinister as a "fork of the web", but a badly thought out approach of going back to faster loading web1.0 by recognizing that quite a lot of JS adds no value to the end user.
It may not be so sinister because it's a badly thought out approach indeed. Although they got quite a few big partners already, this undertake requires rewriting the whole Web which is too much to ask even if you are Google.
But please tell us more about the business model, I see you're a Google employee.
Same as before, just with happier users including myself. Happy users are good for business in the long term.