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WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

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Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#21
post #11
post #7

WordPress is schizophrenic Oh hey let's load up your webpages with all this cr*p by default, tons of javascript, css, external files, fonts, headers, footers useless markup. Oh hey, let's use this plugin to strip all that out. How about not putting it in there in the first place.

I would say in that case, the administrator who didn't properly configure their theme and plugins is "schizophrenic."

Most administrators are lazy. If you write software for thousands or millions of users, sane defaults are a must. I find it useful to keep Saint-Exupéry in mind: "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."

Let's look at the first lines of WordPress's default template:

  
  
  
Why bother with xmlns if it's not well-formed XML anyway?

Why dir and lang if you don't really know what language the content is in? We now have the funny situation that most non-English pages wrongly declare lang="en-US" because W3C evangelists told template authors that lang is really important, rendering the attribute completely useless.

What the heck is profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" supposed to do?

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#22
This is all about ads. "A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach." It's mostly about optimizing some very inefficient ad delivery systems. If you're just displaying text without ads, you don't need AMP.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone. Every single time this comes up the project contributors have said that they will gladly modify to support any network they can. They're also constantly developing new components to fill in the gaps for other embeddable services. You want ? Submit a PR! Open an issue! It's open source! And please, please tell me what's wrong with using e.g. ? It's just…

> The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone. Every single time this comes up the project contributors have said that they will gladly modify to support any network they can. They're also constantly developing new components to fill in the gaps for other embeddable services. You want ? Submit a PR! Open an issue! It's open source! Who gets to decide which pull requests get accepted? What if I wa…

amp-iframe is what you want is this case.

See https://medium.com/@cramforce/2016-will-be-the-year-of-concu... for the long game as to how to build such things in AMP without iframes.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#24
post #22

This is all about ads. "A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach." It's mostly about optimizing some very inefficient ad delivery systems. If you're just displaying text without ads, you don't need AMP.

That's only one benefit of AMP. Another is ensuring that all of the excessive and crappy Javascript that many sites run isn't used -- we expect to be able to do a consistent and better job archiving AMP in the Wayback Machine than arbitrary pages with arbitrary javascript.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#25
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP erects walls around the Open Web and enshrines Google as the gatekeeper. Want to embed content from another site? Great! You can choose from , , , , or . Building an advertising startup? Hooray! I hope you're one of the dozen whitelisted ad networks that allows. In Russia or China? Maybe Google will deign to implement and if we're sufficiently humble. This is not the Web I want.

The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone. Every single time this comes up the project contributors have said that they will gladly modify to support any network they can. They're also constantly developing new components to fill in the gaps for other embeddable services. You want ? Submit a PR! Open an issue! It's open source! And please, please tell me what's wrong with using e.g. ? It's just…

> The project is open source and open to contributions from anyone.

The project is exclusively governed by three Google employees, listed at https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/GOVERNANCE..., all contributions are at their discretion.

All contributors must sign a legally binding licensing agreement with Google which includes a patent grant, per https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/CONTRIBUTI....

The Web is powerful because you don't have to ask permission. AMP is not cut from that cloth.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#26
post #2

As I've noted elsewhere: to use AMP, you must load JavaScript from the AMP CDN, which is operated by Google. So you are handing over the security of your site and your user's privacy to them. From https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-h... : > The AMP runtime is loaded via the mandatory " rel="nofollow">https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"> tag in the AMP document .

Check out the Decentraleyes plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...

The nice thing about a project like AMP is that it's a slow-moving target & all AMP pages fetch from the same URLs. That makes it easy for a tool like Decentraleyes to cache all of the AMP assets, resulting in even more speed & a privacy benefit.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#27
post #8
post #2

As I've noted elsewhere: to use AMP, you must load JavaScript from the AMP CDN, which is operated by Google. So you are handing over the security of your site and your user's privacy to them. From https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-h... : > The AMP runtime is loaded via the mandatory " rel="nofollow">https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"> tag in the AMP document .

AMP is just a subset existing web technologies. It's entirely possible to build a page that loads just as fast or faster, without loading the AMP scripts, if you so choose. But AMP greatly simplifies the process, which is what developers need, and the script enforces the limitations necessary to make the page load and render quickly, which users love. Right now AMP is under heavy development and lots of changes are b…

> At any rate, this is no worse in principle than the Google Analytics scripts everybody includes on every page everywhere, so it's mostly just a bunch of FUD.

This is a rather blind comment. Not everyone uses Google Analytics and those that do have actively chosen to do so. Plus, Google Analytics is inherently tied to Google services so there are no privacy or control issues.

AMP seems to be intended more as an open toolkit more akin to Bootstrap or jQuery. Requiring that AMP's scripts be loaded from a Google CDN is like saying you can't load jQuery or Bootstrap from anywhere but their CDNs. Some developers want to strictly control where their code is hosted for various reasons and Google isn't allowing them to do that.

Some developers also want to control who can and can't log their visitors. Google isn't allowing them to do that in this case. Anything that loads that script can be logged by Google.

Certainly not FUD.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say in that case, the administrator who didn't properly configure their theme and plugins is "schizophrenic."

Most administrators are lazy. If you write software for thousands or millions of users, sane defaults are a must. I find it useful to keep Saint-Exupéry in mind: "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." Let's look at the first lines of WordPress's default template: Why bother with xmlns if it's not well-formed XML anyway? Why dir and lang…

What "default template" would that be?

As for the "lang" attribute, it is set to the language chosen when WordPress was installed.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#29
post #22

This is all about ads. "A goal of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is to ensure effective ad monetization on the mobile web while embracing a user-centric approach." It's mostly about optimizing some very inefficient ad delivery systems. If you're just displaying text without ads, you don't need AMP.

That's only one benefit of AMP. Another is ensuring that all of the excessive and crappy Javascript that many sites run isn't used -- we expect to be able to do a consistent and better job archiving AMP in the Wayback Machine than arbitrary pages with arbitrary javascript.

> Another is ensuring that all of the excessive and crappy Javascript that many sites run isn't used

While I wouldn't argue that there isn't a massive amount of god-awful javascript being written today, but why does a third party, private company get to determine what is or isn't "excessive and crappy" on someone's own website? This sounds like a slippery slope to me.

Re: WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster

#30
post #12
post #4

Are AMP and HTTP/2 best practices contradictory to one another?

Can you elaborate? From what I can tell, AMP makes use of on-demand resource loading, which HTTP/2 prefers over bundled resources thanks to multiplexing.

From what I understood, there are a few contradictions like splitting up assets (preferable in HTTP/2) as opposed to concatenating/merging them (preferable in AMP). Perhaps I misunderstood
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