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Google Makes Emails More Dynamic With AMP For Email (techcrunch.com)
Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. From a report: AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail, Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails. It's been more than a year since Google first announced this initiative. Even by Google standards, that's a long incubation phase, though there's also plenty of backend work necessary to make this feature work.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.
so many ways this is not a good idea.
Sorry, once a message arrives in my INBOX, I do NOT want it to change. I want it STATIC!
Why do some people want to fix things that aren't broken?
If you want a messaging platform with non-static messages, DO NOT CALL IT E-MAIL!
Amen. This just sounds like another attack vector and another reason for Chrome to gobble up even more memory.
The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done.
Things like increasing the attack surface of your e-mail client.
Remember when companies jumped all over the html bandwagon for email? Outlook was especially awful at rendering, iirc, but generally the corporate design got in the way of the actual purpose, which was transmitting information.
Thankfully, people realized this, and probably 90% of the email I see now is just text. Maybe with a logo or something,but that's all.
Amp for email? That's just the html idiocy all over again, only now cached on Google's server for their data collection. No, thanks, please get lost.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The problem is that there's a lot less money in that than something that's insecure and likely to break.
We've already been through this with MS Office documents and PDFs getting additional functionality that just turned out to be a way of spreading malware. Documents, should have no scripting involved. They should display as consistently as possible and be basically static.
It's amazing how arrogant and ignorant these people are in thinking that this isn't going to end badly. We've seen it work out badly from a historical point of view, and now we're getting to see it again.
Not to mention the fact that this runs the risk of being like web standards back in the '90s where they were purposefully incompatible to force people to use a specific browser that had whatever arbitrary, pointless, bullshit feature the web dev had to use.
I can't read your message. Please re-send as plain text.
I already get email messages that are HTML format with almost nothing but remote-loading images. Since I don't permit remote loaded content, those messages are unreadable. AMP sounds like a way to make this problem even more common.
I remember the old fantasy that the Web would be the next operating system. Nobody really thought all that much about who would end up in control of that operating system.
"Nobody really thought about it" really means you didn't think about it.
Lots of people thought about it. During the Browser Wars of Netscape v Microsoft starting in late 1995, control over who owns the future was discussed all the time. Companies spent untold billion dollars fighting for that control. Microsoft spent several billion dollars trying to embed their browser into the operating systems. The Netscape/AOL deal was $4.2 billion with companies desperate to be in control. Various players have entered and exited the field, but the war is still going strong.
Across all the companies, there have been several trillion dollars spent over the decades fighting for that control, and many companies were (and are) fighting to the death.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement