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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

I mean, AMP is a bunch of custom elements and instructions not to use certain features that degrade performance. I'm not sure what part of this you want to be an "open standard", can you be more specific? AMP is more of a best practices guide than anything else.

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I mean google will show a lightning icon next to pages that follow the AMP standard (and plausibly use it as a positive signal in their ranking algorithm). A competing standard would not have these benefits.

I was told by cramforce that there's no need to use AMP if your page is already fast on its own.

Would you get the lightning icon without AMP?

The lightning icon is a carrot, you're assuming malice where it doesn't exist. The lightning icon will go away when being fast is the expectation.

These carrots drive ad dollars, hence my distaste to calling this a "open standard".

As an example, w3c got together to say solid HTTPS websites get a green color in the URL bar. Banks, etc get a higher, more highlighted green color for a special class of certificates. These are open standards that everyone agreed on.

I hope this makes it more clear why AMP is not a open standard.

Yup, just that your fast loading web page won't get the special treatment that AMP pages get on the search results page

The unfortunate thing about AMP from my point of view as a browser developer is that it disincentivizes me from making performance improvements. What's the point in making something faster in a competing browser if Google is preventing developers from using that feature until it's fast in Blink?

Having a new gatekeeper in addition to the standards bodies that we have to get all new features by holds back the Web.

Google isn't a new gatekeeper, there's tons of documentation on their domain already that instructs developers to use/not use certain features for the sake of pagerank. Go look at PageSpeed for example.

It would be great if we didn't have to worry about performance, I hope WebRender gets us there some day, please do continue your work and hopefully the fact that some subset of news sites aren't using features doesn't hold you back.

In the meantime I'm going to avoid using with(), use requestAnimationFrame to prevent dom thrashing, put my scripts at the end of the body, and do all of the things maybe some day I won't have to do.

A good place to start would be admitting just one person to AMP's Governance board that's not on Google's payroll. No single for-profit organization should control something as fundamental as the Web's markup.

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