AMP as Your Web Framework
blog.amp.dev
blog.amp.dev
On the same day Googlers protest retaliation by their own management, a Googler posts about how AMP, the astroturfed, Google-developed and mandated format is the cuddly "open" choice for those who want the "web" (i.e. Google) to win.
Give the web to Google? What could go wrong?
===
And for context, here's what the AMP dev rel says in TFA:
"The second reason is that many compare AMP to RSS, and the media positioned it as competitor to certain other big companies’ walled garden media formats. That narrative certainly didn’t help, and for what it’s worth, we, the AMP team, have never told the story that way..."
And here's the origin story from one of the AMP Project's cofounders and former technical lead, Malte Ubl [0]:
"We were worried about the web not existing anymore due to native apps and walled gardens killing it off. We wanted to make the web competitive. We saw a sense of urgency and thus we decided to build on the extensible web to build AMP instead of waiting for standard and browsers and websites to catch up. I stand behind this process. I'm a practical guy."
Honestly...
[0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597#issuecomm...
One of its advertised qualities is being hosted directly by these ''caches'', which are typically run by Google.
>It’s not an SEO thing.
I've read that Google treats AMP specially in search results, not that I'd know firsthand.
>It’s not a replacement for HTML. It’s a web component framework that can power your whole site.
Doesn't it replace tag names, such as IMG with AMP-IMG? Sure, that's technically still HTML, but only in the most base understanding, since unrecognized tags will be ignored.
>Web pages are already a great distribution format, and AMP just improves upon it by accelerating delivery via AMP caches and by bundling the main content further, for instance by inlining CSS.
These caches, in all practicality, aren't being run by the people who write these pages, which is a major difference, isn't it? You can inline CSS manually; I do.
>The same is true for Paired AMP. It’s super hard to maintain both versions over time, and Paired AMP was never meant to be the end state.
I don't know what this is, but is this telling me they want everything to be AMP?
>AMP isn’t just accelerated, it comes with all sorts of built-in UX advantages (e.g. disallowing interstitials, enforcing a free main thread for smooth interactions).
That may or may not be considered a good thing, but AMP doesn't let you change this, now does it?
>And AMP doesn’t just power pages anymore – you can now build ads, emails and stories with it.
Only Google thinks shoving this garbage into email is a good idea. Only Google and other awful groups are concerned with building ads, too.
>We, the AMP team, want AMP to become a natural choice for modern web development of content websites, and for you to choose AMP as a framework because it genuinely makes you more productive.
So, they do want everything to become AMP, eventually.
>You’ll now only maintain one version of each page by making your AMP canonical, or so-called “AMP first“, and that means your pages benefit from AMP’s performance and UX optimizations across Desktop, mobile and beyond.
This is harrowing to read.
>AMP First doesn’t mean that strictly all pages of your site must be AMP – sometimes you might want maximum flexibility and distribution is not a big concern, like with a member-only area or complex shopping cart.
That's at least the case for now, anyway, right?
>Of course, it might not make sense for you to drop everything and reimplement your site in AMP today, and that’s OK! I just want you to know that we’ve grown up quite a bit, and when you set out to redesign or create something new, AMP is here to help you succeed.
No, I'll continue writing my web pages by hand, only referencing other files on my website if I can help it, and with no JavaScript whatsoever.