Slashdot Mirror
Google is Giving up Some Control of the AMP Format (theverge.com)
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, has been a controversial project since its debut. Critics say AMP is a Google-specific project and it is creating a walled-garden, which would only serve Google's best interests. On its part, Google has insisted that AMP's mission is to benefit the open web, and that many who contribute to AMP are non-Googlers. On Tuesday, Google announced that it would be giving up some control of how the code behind AMP is managed. A report adds: It plans to move the AMP Project to a "new governance model," which is to say that decisions about the code will be made by a committee that includes non-Googlers. Until now, final decisions about AMP's code have been made by Malte Ubl, the tech lead for the AMP Project at Google. A model with a single person in charge is not actually all that rare in open source. That person is often cheekily referred to as the BDFL, or "benevolent dictator for life." Ubl's been that person for AMP, but, he writes, "we've found that it doesn't scale to the size of the AMP Project today. Instead, we want to move to a model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users."
[...] Google has already signed up non-Google people for the Advisory Committee, which will include representatives from The Washington Post, AliExpress, eBay, Cloudflare, and Automattic (which makes WordPress). Ubl says that it will also include "advocates for an open web," including "Leonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google / Chrome, and Terence Eden." Of course, as anybody who's taken part in a committee knows, it's neither a fun solution nor a guarantee that a single company or person won't dominate it. But it's a step in the right direction, and Google is encouraging people to comment on the plan at the AMP Contributor Summit on September 25th.
[...] Google has already signed up non-Google people for the Advisory Committee, which will include representatives from The Washington Post, AliExpress, eBay, Cloudflare, and Automattic (which makes WordPress). Ubl says that it will also include "advocates for an open web," including "Leonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google / Chrome, and Terence Eden." Of course, as anybody who's taken part in a committee knows, it's neither a fun solution nor a guarantee that a single company or person won't dominate it. But it's a step in the right direction, and Google is encouraging people to comment on the plan at the AMP Contributor Summit on September 25th.
Are AMP hosted by google? If so, it's holding the website hostage to google spyware, therefore, really nothing has changed.
There are outside contributors big enough to maintain it when google decides to drop it.
My biggest conplaint with AMP is that it doesn't work. For example, I dearch and get a hit on resdit and click on the result. I get an amp page that looks like reddit, but I am not logged-in, and images don't work, and the link to see the users other posts isn't a link, it is just text. Sometimes I get a special AMP header with an icon that takes me to the actual page. Other times I have to hand edit the URL to dind the actual page. Basically, Google search results are broken for some sites. I think they should be concerned about that!
It's worse than that. From the amp spec:
AMP HTML documents MUST:
contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag.
Literally every single amp request must force the client to load and run javascript from a Google controlled domain.
That's 80kb of minified javascript. To hell with that.
And it's worse even than that. Go to an amp page, and look at what that javascript contains.
this.preconnect.url("https://facebook.com", a);
Similar stuff for instagram, and twitter, and youtube, and vimeo. And take a look at some of the un-minified code for their advertising component of AMP.
ads/_config.js
No. Thank. You.