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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#81

Post by JoshMnem »

marcell wrote: post #7

Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back. It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display consistently across a dozen different mail clients is a huge pain. This is why so many marketing emails use giant images for everything--it's the simples way to get consistent rendering. I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.

Marketing emails use giant images to push the text content below the fold, because they want to entice the user to enable images. Images need to be enabled to track opens.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#82

Post by tejasmanohar »

bdhess wrote: post #48
tejasmanohar wrote: post #27

AMP is, to begin with, Google exerting its market power to extend its control over others’ content. Facebook is doing it, so Google has to. As a consumer, I actually love AMP. Everytime I click a news link on mobile and am taken to AMP, I'm relieved to be free from the extremely distracting original websites. Google has done a lot of exciting work on open standards like JSON-LD [0] and Microdata [1] to bring a better…

We have the exact opposite opinion then. I moved to DuckDuckGo on iOS because I thought the AMP formatted Google search results were so user-hostile. Maybe they’ve fixed the bizarre scrolling and overly sensitive links by now, but I see no reason to find out, because I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

For what it's worth, I only use my phone seriously when I'm out and about, and a lot of times, my internet connection isn't the best, e.g. while in metro

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#83

Post by pasbesoin »

falcolas wrote: post #60
mikeytown2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm waiting for AMP chat; I hear it's fast. /s

And you can run it on any platform, so long as it's Google's. The best user choice since the color of your Model T.

And it will supplant Duo and Allo, that were/are supposed to supplant (or augment, or co-exist -- can't we all just get along?) Hangouts, that was supposed to integrate SMS and MMS, but bollocks.

Anyway, I prefer my email to remain immutable after initial transmission. I don't need another Snapbookthingie...

Which reminds me, Google: You already hosed search results with your first... or second, or third, buzzzzzz... big social, dynamic (comments) push, Plus.

And almost nobody liked Buzz, nor the way you tried to shove it down our throats.

Are you really going to take another stab at sabotaging one of your successful products -- this time, Gmail?

You HAD a successful social platform: Reader. And you nuked it.

You want "social" and "changing content"? Bring back Reader.

Buy a clue.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#84

Post by JoshMnem »

taeric wrote: post #11
marcell wrote: post #7

Good luck! I had the "pleasure" of working on HTML emails a few months back. It was unbelievably painful. Getting even a simple email to display consistently across a dozen different mail clients is a huge pain. This is why so many marketing emails use giant images for everything--it's the simples way to get consistent rendering. I predict whatever Google launches will work in GMail, and GMail only.

I further predict it will work in GMail and Inbox differently from each other. Which is just mind boggling. Why!?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish -- then walled garden.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#87

Post by jjeaff »

ehnto wrote: post #69
makecheck wrote: post #31

Nothing says “we’re listening to your concerns about AMP” like rolling it out further to interfere with a function that is even less suited for AMP. Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much…

Part of why I don't advocate for CDNs when you don't need them is because I want to build robust sites that work for years untouched. For timespans over a year, anything not on your server is brittle. Oops, CDN changed its URL/didn't update their ssl ciphers/went bust and shut down completely and now {js-framework}/{css-library} is missing and my site is broken. What an unforeseeable circumstance!

That's why I like to map one of my own subdomains to the cdn service.

So everything is at cdn.example.com and if I change providers, it's just a dns record change and everything is ready, even if I want to just host my own content.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#88

Post by bastawhiz »

gerdesj wrote: post #34
bastawhiz wrote: post #18

I don't know the technical details of what Google is planning, but if they build something that eases the pain of building cross platform HTML emails, that's a welcome innovation in my opinion. Building emails that "work" even just okay is a ridiculously hard task. Every company I've been at has made some attempt with mediocre results at best (oh, you're using _Outlook_?). I'm not holding my breath for something good…

"but if they build something that eases the pain of building cross platform HTML emails" On the other hand, if HTML is excluded then the message gets through without scope for mischief.

HTML emails are here to stay, and the billions of dollars that companies pour into designing, building, and sending them are proof of that. Given the constraint that we're stuck writing and consuming them, I'd rather have a technology that does a good job than a technology that makes me want to boil my laptop.

If you're afraid of HTML, by all means please check your email from a sandboxed VM in the terminal. But some poor chump is still going to be toiling away to make the latest Pottery Barn newsletter look great on a Blackberry, so we'd might as well build better tools.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#89

Post by bob_theslob646 »

>What Google wants to do is bridge that moat, essentially to allow applications to run inside emails, limited ones to be sure, but by definition the kind of thing that belongs on the other side of the moat.

How is this bad?

I do not understand the hate?

If you do not like the product then move on.

I can see this working well on a mobile devices, not sure how it will work on other platforms, but I'm definitely open to giving it a shot.

The best part about this is if I don't like it I can always switch.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#90

Post by cwyers »

> See, email belongs to a special class. Nobody really likes it, but it’s the way nobody really likes sidewalks, or electrical outlets, or forks. It not that there’s something wrong with them. It’s that they’re mature, useful items that do exactly what they need to do. They’ve transcended the world of likes and dislikes.

Except forks are fine and e-mails are a dumpster fire.

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