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'Why I Decided To Disable AMP On My Site' (alexkras.com)
Web developer Alex Kras on Monday listed a number of reasons why he dislikes Google's AMP project, and why he pulled support for it on his website. From his post: Back in the day we used to have WAP pages -- specific web pages that were presented only to mobile devices. Opting into AMP, for publishers, is kind of like going back to those days. Instead of using responsive design (making sure that one version of the site works well on all devices) publishers are forced to maintain two versions of each page -- their regular version for larger devices and mobile phones that don't use Google and the AMP version. The benefit of AMP is that it imposes tough restrictions on content, making it load fast. The issue with this approach is that AMP becomes a subset of the original content. For example, user comments are often removed. I also find the way images load in AMP to be buggy. AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I've seen it fail fairly regularly, leaving the article with an empty white square instead of the image. [...] It's up to publishers to decide if they want to add AMP support on their site. Users, however, don't have an option to turn AMP off. It would be nice if Google provided a user level setting to turn results rendered as AMP off. Unfortunately, even if they were to add this option, it wouldn't help much when Twitter of Facebook would decide to server AMP. Further reading: Kill Google AMP before it KILLS the web - The Register, The Problem With Google AMP, 2 Billion Pages On Web Now Use Google's AMP, Pages Now Load Twice As Fast. John Gruber on open web: Fuck Facebook.
And in the same way they block indexing by search engines, Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts.
That's not bad thing though; nothing of value is lost and the storage space could be used for more valuable stuff.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, except for those stupid sites that detect the mobile browser regardless of what UA is reported by this feature and force you to use the mobile version no matter what. Fuck those sites.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
#DeleteFacebook
I don't whether AMP is responsible, but I visited a site about a week ago with progressive content and image load as I paged down. This is annoying, but nothing new.
Since I wanted to CTRL-F to search within the page, I spent 5 s manually pressing PG-DOWN to fully load the page.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that most of the top of the page—previously loaded already—had now disappeared from my document, and was doing progressive load on the way back up.
That wasn't just irritating. That was outright /etc/hosts-level hellban territory.
Please, for the love of God, look upon my 16 DIMM slots ye Mighty frugal HTTP server, and load the whole damn document all at once, SVP.
I can agree with the goal of limiting download bandwidth to just what the user has viewed.
However dynamically UNloading that content after it has scrolled past, such that it must be downloaded AGAIN if the user scrolls back up strikes me as counter productive to the goal of minimizing bandwidth consumption.
There is no justification for not loading all of the html (such that it can be searched) at the start however.
... Gruber has written specifically about AMP. https://daringfireball.net/lin...
If you are a publisher and your web pages don't load fast, the sane solution is to fix your fucking website so that pages load fast, not to throw your hands up in the air and implement AMP.
He has written more about it in the past -- links are in that piece.
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