Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zikes | Hacker News Reader

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AMP is just a subset existing web technologies. It's entirely possible to build a page that loads just as fast or faster, without loading the AMP scripts, if you so choose. But AMP greatly simplifies the process, which is what developers need, and the script enforces the limitations necessary to make the page load and render quickly, which users love.

Right now AMP is under heavy development and lots of changes are being made very quickly. That mandatory script loads other resources from the same domain on an as-needed basis, which is a crucial aspect of how AMP is designed to work. I don't know if the v1 release will include a distribution package for self-hosting, but it's not too much of a stretch to believe they've decided to go with a central CDN just to simplify development for the early stages of the project.

At any rate, this is no worse in principle than the Google Analytics scripts everybody includes on every page everywhere, so it's mostly just a bunch of FUD.

AMP erects walls around the Open Web and enshrines Google as the gatekeeper.

Want to embed content from another site? Great! You can choose from <amp-twitter>, <amp-facebook>, <amp-instagram>, <amp-pinterest>, or <amp-youtube>.

Building an advertising startup? Hooray! I hope you're one of the dozen whitelisted ad networks that <amp-ad> allows.

In Russia or China? Maybe Google will deign to implement <amp-vk> and <amp-sinaweibo> if we're sufficiently humble.

This is not the Web I want.

IIRC you can use <amp-iframe> to load anything you want.

The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone. Every single time this comes up the project contributors have said that they will gladly modify <amp-ad> to support any network they can. They're also constantly developing new <amp-X> components to fill in the gaps for other embeddable services. You want <amp-vk>? Submit a PR! Open an issue! It's open source!

And please, please tell me what's wrong with using e.g. <amp-youtube>? It's just a web component! All it does is what you want it to do, and if it doesn't do what you want then either you shouldn't do that, or you can just submit a PR.

The whole point of AMP is 1) make sure the developer doesn't do anything that'll make the page load unnecessarily slowly or repaint/relayout unnecessarily and 2) make it way easier for the developer to accomplish #1 because all you have to do is type <amp-youtube>.

AMP is no different from, say, jQuery, or React, or Angular. It's a different way of doing things, but it's not a "gatekeeper" on the web. It's just another option, one more tool in your belt, if you so choose.

> The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone. Every single time this comes up the project contributors have said that they will gladly modify <amp-ad> to support any network they can. They're also constantly developing new <amp-X> components to fill in the gaps for other embeddable services. You want <amp-vk>? Submit a PR! Open an issue! It's open source!

Who gets to decide which pull requests get accepted? What if I wanted to create an amp component for my network with a userbase of two people?

amp-iframe is what you want is this case.

See https://medium.com/@cramforce/2016-will-be-the-year-of-concu... for the long game as to how to build such things in AMP without iframes.

> The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone.

The project is exclusively governed by three Google employees, listed at https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/GOVERNANCE..., all contributions are at their discretion.

All contributors must sign a legally binding licensing agreement with Google which includes a patent grant, per https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/CONTRIBUTI....

The Web is powerful because you don't have to ask permission. AMP is not cut from that cloth.

I don't see what makes it different from any other open source project. Of course it's going to have technical leads and core committers, it's not like you can go force a PR merge on jQuery trunk any time you please. I'm aghast that you would even suggest such a thing.

And CLA's aren't fun, but they're hardly new, either.[1]

If you don't like that it's Google, that's fine, but at least be honest with yourself about it. But unless you've submitted a PR or can cite a PR (on any Google OSS repo at all) that they've rejected purely on the basis that Google is somehow doing wrong by the developers, then what are we even talking about?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#...

To me the problematic part that makes it different to at least some open source projects is that all those technical leads and core committers are apparently employed by Google (and working on company time, I assume). That could mean Google, and Google alone, gets to decide where it goes.

Honestly, the only criticism I'm hearing over and over is "because Google", and considering their track record with Chrome, Android, Angular, Polymer, Go, and literally hundreds of other open-source projects, I'm perfectly okay with that.

The whole point of AMP is...

Right. Looking at this whole thing humorously, it seems like the uproar is over AMP is developers getting angry at a tool designed to prevent them from shooting themselves in the foot, for removing their ability to shoot themselves in the foot :)

I look at it as HTML5 "strict" mode.

Open Source does not really mean better and open. The role of Google as Gatekeeper remains. Android is Open source too but how many non-Google controlled Android phones do you see on market ?

A few.

http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Devices

Open source means there's no such thing as a "Gatekeeper". As with every other open source project ever, you can just fork it. How many open source projects today are forked from their original repo because a large enough portion of the users and developers disagreed with the ones in control?

Honestly, this argument is just silly. https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects read that list and name one time where Google abused the control they had over the project they created. They already have a good track record for open source. This "gatekeeper" nonsense is just a bunch of unnecessary FUD.

> you can just submit a PR.

And wait for google to accept it at their own discretion. That's exactly what a gatekeeper is.

> At any rate, this is no worse in principle than the Google Analytics scripts everybody includes on every page everywhere, so it's mostly just a bunch of FUD.

This is a rather blind comment. Not everyone uses Google Analytics and those that do have actively chosen to do so. Plus, Google Analytics is inherently tied to Google services so there are no privacy or control issues.

AMP seems to be intended more as an open toolkit more akin to Bootstrap or jQuery. Requiring that AMP's scripts be loaded from a Google CDN is like saying you can't load jQuery or Bootstrap from anywhere but their CDNs. Some developers want to strictly control where their code is hosted for various reasons and Google isn't allowing them to do that.

Some developers also want to control who can and can't log their visitors. Google isn't allowing them to do that in this case. Anything that loads that script can be logged by Google.

Certainly not FUD.

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