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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#101

Post by y03a »

jjeaff wrote: post #87
ehnto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't that kill the possibility that a visitor will already have common content cached when visiting your site for the first time? I know that's not the only reason to use a CDN, but it's a pretty big one.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#102

Post by dmix »

CapacitorSet wrote: post #20

Related reading: Against an increasingly user-hostile Web , https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/ >It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we…

In this case page load times are being valued over everything (not just AMP but also the search rankings algorithm).

I'm not 100% sure if it's a vanity metric for Google or not.

...Google does have some of the greatest statistical minds in the world, just maybe not the best product/UX minds.

KPI's can be highly misleading when it's disconnected from raw UX. It's difficult to measure user emotional experience, especially when you have a monopoly on user attention with Google Search and total product lock-in with Gmail. When users don't have alternative options analytics stats can be deceiving.

And just because a user completes X task a hundred milliseconds faster it doesn't necessarily mean the UX was better. And just because the UX was made incrementally worse doesn't mean I'm going to use Google/Gmail any less. But enough of small cuts can build up into a serious wound.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#103

Post by zeroimpl »

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…

Seriously. Would be great if somebody could just declare a new mime-type such as "text/html5" that could be used to activate modern html rendering in email clients and would be shipped alongside the existing "text/html" and "text/plain" components. Eventually when enough email clients support this, we could stop generating the legacy html emails and only include text/html5 and text/plain mime types in emails.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#106

Post by AndrewKemendo »

CapacitorSet wrote: post #20

Related reading: Against an increasingly user-hostile Web , https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/ >It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we…

I remember reading that article and thinking that the author either isn't old enough to remember the 90s web or has memory loss about how hostile it was to the user.

Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#107

Post by ucaetano »

bob_theslob646 wrote: post #89

>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…

> I do not understand the hate?

Oh, the hate is just the new version of the ASCII ribbon against HTML email...

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#109

Post by tribune »

Google is on a mission to own every corner of everything related to the Internet. Email sucks, but I'll keep my boring old email in lieu of Google shoving more targeted advertising in my face, thank you very much.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#110

Post by toast0 »

y03a wrote: post #101
jjeaff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't that kill the possibility that a visitor will already have common content cached when visiting your site for the first time? I know that's not the only reason to use a CDN, but it's a pretty big one.

Honestly with all the versions of js libraries and all the CDN hosts, the limitations of cache size and the insane bloat of webpages, I think you're going to have to be pretty lucky to get any beneficial cache hits from unrelated third party sites.
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