Slashdot Mirror
The Meaning of AMP (adactio.com)
Last week, Ethan Marcotte, an independent web designer, shared how Google describes AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). People at Google says AMP "isn't a 'proprietary format'; it's an open standard that anyone can contribute to." But that definition, Marcotte argues, isn't necessarily an honest one. He writes: On the face of it, this statement's true. AMP's markup isn't proprietary as such: rather, all those odd-looking amp- tags are custom elements, part of the HTML standard. And the specification's published, edited, and distributed on GitHub, under one of the more permissive licenses available. So, yes. The HTML standard does allow for the creation of custom elements, it's true, and AMP's license is quite liberal. But spend a bit of time with the rules that outline AMP's governance. Significant features and changes require the approval of AMP's Technical Lead and one Core Committer -- and if you peruse the list of AMP's Core Committers, that list seems exclusively staffed and led by Google employees. Now, there's nothing wrong with this. After all, AMP is a Google-backed project, and they're free to establish any governance model they deem appropriate. But when I hear AMP described as an open, community-led project, it strikes me as incredibly problematic, and more than a little troubling. AMP is, I think, best described as nominally open-source. It's a corporate-led product initiative built with, and distributed on, open web technologies. Jeremy Keith, a web developer, further adds: If AMP were actually the product of working web developers, this justification would make sense. As it is, we've got one team at Google citing the preference of another team at Google but representing it as the will of the people. This is just one example of AMP's sneaky marketing where some finely-shaved semantics allows them to appear far more reasonable than they actually are. At AMP Conf, the Google Search team were at pains to repeat over and over that AMP pages wouldn't get any preferential treatment in search results ... but they appear in a carousel above the search results. Now, if you were to ask any right-thinking person whether they think having their page appear right at the top of a list of search results would be considered preferential treatment, I think they would say hell, yes! This is the only reason why The Guardian, for instance, even have AMP versions of their content -- it's not for the performance benefits (their non-AMP pages are faster); it's for that prime real estate in the carousel. The same semantic nit-picking can be found in their defence of caching. See, they've even got me calling it caching! It's hosting. If I click on a search result, and I am taken to page that has a URL beginning with https://www.google.com/amp/s/... then that page is being hosted on the domain google.com. That is literally what hosting means. Now, you might argue that the original version was hosted on a different domain, but the version that the user gets sent to is the Google copy. You can call it caching if you like, but you can't tell me that Google aren't hosting AMP pages. That's a particularly low blow, because it's such a bait'n'switch.
I find that AMP breaks pages and I'd rather turn it off if I could find a way. I can't bookmark the pages, the links are wrong, and sometimes they don't render properly. If I can hack the URL and find the *real* page it usually works better. Google is using AMP as an excuse to take over pages from other sites so they can track people better. At this point, just turn on private browsing mode before using any Google page.
This sounds like a dominance game to me. Pretend it's an 'open standard' to get it widely adopted, meanwhile you're the one driving the so-called 'open standard'; voila, you're the de-facto alpha.
i'm willing to entertain the claims of this article, but seriously, if "working web developers" had any more input on standards, we'd all need 16-core CPUs and 64GB of RAM just to use a web browser.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
You completely missed the main point of the fine article - Google is going to considerable lengths to make web developers think AMP is open but in reality it is completely controlled by Google.
At least you managed to pick up on the fact that article contained the word Google. I guess that's a start.
AMP is google dabbling in the microsoft originated corruption process known as Embrace and Extend. You take a standard and fully implement it, then add a few new features. You create huge incentives to use those features such as an IDE that doesn't distinguish between standard and non-standard HTML, and a browser that gets better performance when you use the new features. Pretty soon everyone inadvertently uses the features and all the other parts of the web break except for those using the google browser and google news feeds and google search. The competition and the general standard withers on the vine. You then keep introducing new features, and especially insidious ones, that gather information from users or are introduced ahead of their adequate documentation to stay one step ahead of other implementers. Finally you tie it to features only available on your system, such as the Microsoft OS, or to logged in google users.
2. profit.
there is no ??? step in embrace and extend.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.