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Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

shkspr.mobi

11–20 of 130 posts

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#11
This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2) AMP being actively harmful to the web ecosystem in principle.

(1) Comments on the implementation I don't know nearly enough to contest. It's a new technology, and will take a lot of changes in and out of Google to get right. It's also early days - continue raising a stink about things like this and I expect it to get better quick.

(2) The principle of AMP leads to a very interesting discussion. The fact that the top-level URL users go to is not the canonical URL for the page does stray into "breaking the web" territory, at least until it's better supported in browsers. On the other hand, as I understand it that's a technical requirement for AMP to be able to verify the content served through it, which is a requirement in turn for keeping AMP page quality high (in terms of latency, etc, rather than content judgements). Which I think is the most enticing part of AMP, and not something that should be given up lightly.

I see AMP as a possible answer to the tragedy-of-the-commons problems that have resulted from standardizing on third party display ads for monetization, third party scripts for analytics, etc. Giving someone else a hook into your page that isn't incentivized to keep it fast and reliable leads to an end state where publishers have no reason to clean up the experience on their own sites because that'd cost them money, and because the bad experience on every other site prevents them from being commensurately rewarded for being a good player. (E.g. adblockers affect every site equally). And the third party tech providers have no incentive to fix things for similar reasons - alternative providers out there would cause the same poor user experiences anyways, and make more money from doing so and enabling them to sell to publishers better. If we cannot rely on principled actions from publishers or tech providers, how does the experience of the web get better enough broadly?

AMP to me is an answer to that - maybe not the best answer, but the most viable one I've seen so far. It allows for direct control of what is/isn't possible, and if it gains traction may have enough clout to push for some of those better experiences that aren't arising naturally.

The other possible answers I see don't seem to be working better. Relying on regulation seems destined to failure; user experience is too messy to craft rules around, and nobody is placed to enforce them globally. Relying on common gatekeepers seems to be failing - Google algorithm changes worked for a while to incentivize page quality, but I don't think Facebook is (or should?) making equivalent judgements about the quality of content users link to for ranking purposes, and it seems even harder to enforce in other direct-user-sharing sites like Twitter.

[Edit] Disclaimer: I work for Google, in Technical Infrastructure. I used to be in Ads, though not related to AMP.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#12
I can't help but feel AMP is a step in the wrong direction and was quite possibly a disingenuous play from Google from the get-go.

URL highjacking is harmful for the web and I can't for the life of me understand how this project could get past the initial stages without that drawback being understood.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#13

AMP is yet another good idea that Google didn't test properly or think through. As far as I can see, you can't click through to the actual page from an AMP page, which sucks if you want to share the link or something.

I don't really understand why it's not done as a typical content-negotiation thing. Perhaps there's a good reason but since my first query of why they were doing something wasn't valid HTML and the reply was "O(fun) is important"...

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#14
I did a technical review of what I felt were the major pros/cons of implementing AMP pages:

http://blog.robertelder.org/adding-support-for-amp-pages/

Edit: To save you a click, here are some of the key points:

- You can't use Javascript on AMP pages, but you can put Javascript in iframes or substitute the javascript feature for an existing amp-component.

- AMP pages require that Javascript is enabled.

- In order for pages to pass AMP validation you must include the "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js" script on AMP pages. Furthermore, I believe you are required to hotlink to the ampproject version as I have been unable to pass validation with a locally served copy of these scripts.

- You can't use inline 'style="..."' tags

- AMP uses inline 'style="..."' tags on rendered markup

- External stylesheets are not allowed

- You will likely want to maintain a separate AMP view and a non-amp version of your pages.

- The DOM structure of AMP pages will be slightly different than for desktop pages.

I wouldn't say that I like AMP, but since the world is going mobile I figured I should try to become and early adopter for AMP. In a way, I kind of hope that the AMP projects gets abandoned, but if that happens then I'll have wasted a bunch of time adopting it.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#15
Slightly off topic, but does anyone else have trouble loading AMP pages on their iPhone Safari browser? Almost any AMP page I try to load is blank with a banner on top containing the address of the page, and then my only solution is to load the desktop version to see the page.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#16

I did a technical review of what I felt were the major pros/cons of implementing AMP pages: http://blog.robertelder.org/adding-support-for-amp-pages/ Edit: To save you a click, here are some of the key points: - You can't use Javascript on AMP pages, but you can put Javascript in iframes or substitute the javascript feature for an existing amp-component. - AMP pages require that Javascript is enabled. - In order for…

Thanks for writing the review, it's a summary.

BTW. Without judging whether AMP is good or bad, I'll say in this comment you just highlighted the mechanism by which many a bad thing becomes commonplace. "I wish $thing wouldn't be done, but because $market_realities, I figure I should adopt the $thing for now". Even if nobody wants $thing to happen, when many people think like this, it'll get adopted anyway, and then enshrined as the new status quo.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#17
All the discussions focus on AMP in isolation, but I keep wondering - is AMP just a knee-jerk reaction to the utter absurdity of current bloat proliferation on webpages, or is it a part of a bigger idea for reshaping the web? If it is the latter, I'd love to learn what the idea is, so it can be discussed in full.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#18

AMP is yet another good idea that Google didn't test properly or think through. As far as I can see, you can't click through to the actual page from an AMP page, which sucks if you want to share the link or something.

> AMP is yet another good idea Can you explain why AMP is a good idea? I still don't really understand it, I'm afraid.

Serving everything from one hostname means (i) you don't get 20 DNS lookups to serve a page, one of which might hang up for 5 seconds; (ii) you can use a protocol like http/2 to avoid TCP and SSL renegotiations; (iii) you can stop people from loading up pages with 20MB of Javascript.

There is no doubt that AMP is fast.

The other angle is how it reinforces Google's position for advertising, analytics, search, video and such. On one hand you could say it is "evil" because they are a monopolist, but the status quo is so bad when ad networks are weighing you down with multiple tracking pixels, malware service, etc.

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#19
post #7

AMP is yet another good idea that Google didn't test properly or think through. As far as I can see, you can't click through to the actual page from an AMP page, which sucks if you want to share the link or something.

Perhaps who ever came up with it, an engineer, had some good ideas, and then when Google executives took a look they said wonderful here is an opportunity to: - Cut off third party ad networks - Reduce bounce rates from Google.com to outside sites

I think AMP is the wrong solution, but it does support quite a few third party ad networks:

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad

Re: Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

#20
post #15

Slightly off topic, but does anyone else have trouble loading AMP pages on their iPhone Safari browser? Almost any AMP page I try to load is blank with a banner on top containing the address of the page, and then my only solution is to load the desktop version to see the page.

Content blocker problem? They load fine on my iPhone, but if you're blocking the AMP JS library you may have problems.
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