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Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#161

Post by coldtea »

cbsmith wrote: post #135
coldtea wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. First of all, that's an ad hominem. If publication independence is important, then it remains important whether Gruber is hypocritical about it or not. Second, one might want apps to be curated…

Pointing out a seeming contradiction in an advocate's advocacy is not an ad hominem.

Having your central argument against his case focused on his personal contradiction, is:

  "That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you 
  didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can 
  install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the 
  one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as 
  long as it is "convenient" for most people."

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#162

Post by coldtea »

cmurf wrote: post #160
raarts wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But rebutting an argument by attacking the character of the person making it, is.

Ad hominem attacks are considered logical fallacies only when they're used instead of a dismantling someone's arguments. If they're not making a sound argument at all, yet they continue to make it, there's no way to argue the argument, the problem is a character defect - so attacking the character of the person is logical in that case and accepted in debate. Not all people are good. And not all smart people argue log…

>Ad hominem attacks are considered logical fallacies only when they're used instead of a dismantling someone's arguments.

Which is precisely the case here.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#163

Post by vesinisa »

MBCook wrote: post #86
ehsankia wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly... Saying that it's "technically possible to fix all performance issues" is like saying that it's "technically possible to write your script in C instead of Python". Sure it is, but no one has been doing it and if it wasn't for AMP, it would've stayed a slow hell for users, if not getting even worse. If you've got a better suggestion to motivate all these news sites to spend thousands rewriting their website…

See what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14384560 You say it's been solving problems, but for me it's only been causing them. It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS. Also the slow pages? Reader mode on safari has worked fantastically on them for years. Slow pages wasn't even a problem for me because of reader mode. Not only were they faster they were also easier to read becau…

> It's made it significantly harder to use Google search on iOS.

Works well enough on Android Chrome. Irony is, AMP, Android, Chrome and Google Search are all Alphabet (Google) products. I am personally all for platform portability, but certainly it's been Apple who have been pushing for One Closed Ecosystem since the introduction of iPhone, and Apple users have been very happy about it and playing down the vendor lock-in issue - some even as far as claiming it desirable that The One Benevolent Vendor control everything (note that real Chrome is not available on App Store simply because Apple has decided that iOS users should only use the Safari rendering engine!)

Now that there's a shard in the walled garden, another player seemingly using the very same tactics as Apple, it's frustrating to see the same users complain about how much it sucks to be disenfranchised from modern computing because they use a different vendor - only this time Apple is the "other" vendor.

Should Google succeed to marginalize iOS (assuming this is intentional and not just a bug in Safari), I bet many of these folks will soon be writing about how great it's that Google controls everything, how Material embodies the latest hip in UX and how the new Pixel has become so integral to their daily life.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#164

Post by threeseed »

jeffbax wrote: post #110
dyarosla wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the top behavior.

Its literally the behavior for 99% of scroll bars across iOS. I don't know how you made it this far without it, it's in almost every application.

It's not something developers have to implement so only if you are rolling your own UIScrollView/UITableView components would you have to worry about it.

Also it's been there since iOS 1.0 so quite a while now.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#165

Post by cramforce »

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#166

Post by Sephr »

I feel like the majority of the benefits of Google AMP could be realized with an nginx & Apache plugin combined with Google's CDN.

If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#167

Post by cramforce »

blinkingled wrote: post #22
notgood wrote: post #7

"publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it. That genie i…

Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages." You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that…

With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#168

Post by dreamcompiler »

MBCook wrote: post #72
skybrian wrote: post #10

"If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own." Is anyone working on a competing standard?

It's called HTML, and it's been around for a number of years. If you don't put 12 megs of JavaScript on it and five auto playing video ads… you'd be surprised how fast web pages can be. This isn't a problem that "needs" solving. It's not like it's impossible or even difficult to make a fast loading pages with the existing technologies. The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn…

> The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.

There's probably another factor involved: The people who actually build the sites rarely have final say on their content. They usually report to a VP of marketing who is non-technical and who doesn't care about load time but does want as much bling and ad revenue as possible.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#169

Post by cramforce »

MBCook wrote: post #28
blinkingled wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages." You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that…

AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help. I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea. Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't…

AMP is HTML5, so by definition it cannot outperform it. It is just the web. That is a feature.

Re: Kill Google AMP before it kills the web

#170

Post by duskwuff »

evolve2k wrote: post #126

"it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view" Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?

Tap the status bar -- the bit at the very top with the time, your battery level, and whatnot.

As Gruber mentions, this works on almost anything that scrolls vertically, not just the browser.

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