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Can the Most Contentious Piece of the Web Form the Basis of a New Standard? Inside Google's Plan To Make the Whole Web as Fast as AMP (theverge.com)
Dieter Bohn, writing for The Verge: In a blog post today, Google is announcing that it's formally embarking on a project to convince the group in charge of web standards to adopt technology inspired by its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework. In theory, it would mean that virtually any webpage could gain the same benefits as AMP: near-instantaneous loading, distribution on multiple platforms, and (critically) more prominent placement on Google properties. This is important, a little tricky to understand, and critical to how the web and Google interact in the future. In many ways, Google's success or failure in this endeavor will play a major role in shaping how the web works on your phone.
[...] By creating AMP, Google blithely walked right into the center of a thicket comprised of developers concerned about the future of the web. Publishers are worried about ceding too much control of their distribution to gigantic tech companies, and all of the above are worried that Google is not so much a steward of the web but rather its nefarious puppet master. The whole situation is slightly frustrating to David Besbris, VP of search engineering at Google. Earlier this week, I went to Mountain View to talk with Besbris and Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP. "This is honestly a fairly altruistic project from our perspective," says Besbris. "It wasn't like we invented AMP because we wanted to control everything, like people assume," he says. Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP's inception.
[...] By creating AMP, Google blithely walked right into the center of a thicket comprised of developers concerned about the future of the web. Publishers are worried about ceding too much control of their distribution to gigantic tech companies, and all of the above are worried that Google is not so much a steward of the web but rather its nefarious puppet master. The whole situation is slightly frustrating to David Besbris, VP of search engineering at Google. Earlier this week, I went to Mountain View to talk with Besbris and Malte Ubl, engineering lead for AMP. "This is honestly a fairly altruistic project from our perspective," says Besbris. "It wasn't like we invented AMP because we wanted to control everything, like people assume," he says. Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP's inception.
Isn't it their fault mostly that most pages nowadays are bloated, slow loading messes.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
This is a very good idea. I can't see any potential issues with adopting this. I did notice ads show up too slowly on my phone sometimes. Hopefully this will solve that problem.
Ad block + script block, instant 2-3X web page loading increase. It's all the useless content and invasive ads they put that slows everything down.
There are so many websites written with terrible javascript includes and the flavor-of-the-week ajax framework.
I disliked AMP so much that I stopped using Google search on my phone, and switched to DuckDuckGo. The last thing we need is more of this crap interfering with the browser paradigm.
If this takes off I’ll make my own web standard.
Some things are really boring in and of themselves, but don't change because they fill a necessary niche.
Article is worth a read:
https://beta.techcrunch.com/20...
Check your premises.
...they're getting rid of all of the ads?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
What do you mean I can't turn it off? Sure I can.
DuckDuckGo became my default browser on mobile. Before long, I switched to it on desktop as well, ditching Chrome for Firefox in the same step. And my primary email is now at ProtonMail. The Gmail account I've had since the year Gmail was announced is slowly withering away, getting fewer and fewer emails that actually matter. Before long I'll completely switch over and "delete" the Gmail account's contents (which I know they'll keep archived, as well as the data about me they've harvested from it over the years; I'll just consider it their last middle finger to me as I leave their services forever, and a lasting reminder of why I left).
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but honestly it feels pretty good personally, and well worth the very minor pain of switching over.
This is all to drive the web in directions that Benefit Google , anything else is incidental.
The strain that mobile website developers are putting on HTML is enormous. Just make your own walled garden Web app already, Google. You're nine-tenths the way there.
I don't think this is a good idea. As someone that owns a software company, I tell my clients when they have terrible ideas that we shouldn't do them. If they insist, without a good explanation, there are other people that are happy to work on stupid crap with disastrous long term consequences.
I have zero desire to work on accelerated mobile pages, and I think the performance benefits associated with them are far outweighed by the crappy solution of bizarre existing standards, caching problems, and all the other issues that have nothing to significantly offer my clients.
I am not writing content for the New York Times, or helping them with their infrastructure, so my perspective may be somewhat limited.
When you have Google committing censorship over on YouTube and deciding that some viewpoints they disagree with get axed...they're not fit to be steward of anything. This is the same Google that caved to Chinese authorities versus political activists and critics of the communist regime there, right? Yeah, they don't need this kind of power.
Social Media Handywoman at Texas Boys Balloo
"The Web" is already an open publishing platform with "near instantaneous loading" if all you're talking about is HTML and a bit of CSS.
If you want to add more, you can use JavaScript after the page has loaded to add interaction.
What a revelation.
Hmm... While my decision a while back to to begin transitioning away from Google for most searches was a good one, it may only be a temporary personal solution (or act of resistance) against a company that, frankly, already has way too much say about what is available on the 'net and how it's viewed. Isn't the explosion of ads and the gratuitous use of silly Javascript effects that litter every web page (hell... some sites' pages require Javascript just to implement anchors/links) one of the major reasons that web page loading has gotten slow? They don't really believe I'll be thrilled that ads and even more Javascript will be downloaded nearly instantaneously onto my phone, do they? (Or onto my desktop because, most assuredly, it won't be limited to just mobile.)
I'm beginning to think Richard Stallman's got the right idea about using/browsing the web. (See here) Probably time to begin adopting some of his practices.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
OF COURSE it will take off, because the W3C will dance with anyone. Just like google+friends shoved HTML5 down its throat. No reason why they can't do that again.
This looks like good news to me. Google is proposing a standard, which any site can meet, that will get them into Google's AMP listings without using AMP. Isn't that what people have been asking for?
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
"Instead, he argues, go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP's inception."
I don't get it. What was "dire" about the web before AMP? The use of responsive design, which Google trumpeted around as THE solution to mobile that they decided PageRank would be influenced by even though there are actually better options than "responsive design"? The overuse of ads on mobile devices where Google and Apple have been extremely reluctant to just simply block all ads despite the fact that ads have never had any place on any device that uses a battery?
Dire means "extremely serious or urgent".
The only thing "extremely serious or urgent" is to fire Besbris ASAP and re-evaluate the usefulness of AMP (hint: It's not).
"...go back and look at how dire the state of the mobile web was a few years ago, before AMP's inception."
What an incredibly narcissistic thing to say. As if the only speedy and responsive sites today are using AMP. Plenty of sites don't need AMP and never will.
Is the standard better? Is there a x-platform reference implementation? Is it crypto by default? Does it have other niceties like obfuscation/privacy features or some mesh networking at app layer built in? Does it get rid of the mess that HTML5/CSS3/JS is by now? Does it have offline mode with accompaning abstraction by default? Does it have UI that doesn't suck? Does it offer nothing but absolute measurements. In metric! ... If so, where is the effing problem?
If the new thing is better and cross-platform FOSS reference implementations of browsers prove this no one gives a flying f*ck who came up with the standard, no? The web is historically grown and even Berners-Lee would like to redo it if he could.
Google has the power to build a new web. Let them do it if they wish. If it turns out to be better than this one, fine. I'm in.
If not, well, no harm done, right? Don't like it, don't use it. It's the web. It's open. Chill.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If they think anyone gives a shit about AMP, they're right. We want to see less of it. If they think they're making things better, they're not.
I'd rather see a move away from Google controlling the web. They already control HTTP/2.
The first question that needs to be asked is whether you want presentation to be controlled or for presentation to be guided.
If the former, if you want the page creator to be able to dictate how the page looks, then you want to be able to define windows on the display where a window contains fixed information (in which case use DVI) or it contains input, in which case you're running a client-side script - which should probably be byte-encoded. How about a language that uses bytecoding and is system independent? I know one, it begins with the letter J and sounds like coffee. All you need is to have the output be recognized as HTML and you can get rid of insecure crap.
If you want guided output, then you absolutely do not care if it's a mobile device or not. The author of the page has no business knowing or caring what browser you use or what display you use. They deliver information and your device handles the presentation. This means you get rid of CSS because you as the author should have no say in such things. The user gets to control it all.
Those are your options.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Fuck AMP
Opt-in by default is evil.
But this is evil and 'lol'.
CAPTCHA: stretch
A data standard does not the web make.