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Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

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Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#71

Post by dvtrn »

zdragnar wrote: post #67
dvtrn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent post (in fact, the segment you quoted) literally says that it's okay when it is useful functionality, i.e. not when it's just to fill out a form. Since when did forms become useless and what web-based video editor are you (or the original reply-er) pointing to that uses AMP?

We're talking about two completely separate types of websites. Nobody said forms are useless. Web-based video editing was a hypothetical example. AMP wasn't really part of this discussion; presumably, lots of JS + PWA functionality in the hypothetical video editing example was the referenced useful functionality. Take Google Sheets as an example. I don't know what the total download size is for the JS (certainly not…

We're talking about two completely separate types of websites. Nobody said forms are useless. Web-based video editing was a hypothetical example. AMP wasn't really part of this discussion

This entire discussion started from an opinionated blog post that directly discusses AMP and it's performative nature on the web.

So yes.

It is.

You can't just invent a hypothetical that makes it easier to justify exceptions to the very topic the original blog post we're talking about here, of course exceptional things like resource-heavy, full-featured web apps are going to be outliers to lightweight payloads for web apps. For some reason I highly doubt those were the types of use-cases Google had in mind when AMP was released, so why are we even considering exigent outliers on this one?

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#72

Post by dvtrn »

osrec wrote: post #68
dvtrn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but why even are web editing applications even being pushed to the web? Why even is this hypothetical relevant for a discussion of AMP here? I understand more and more former desktop operations are being pushed to web clients but full-fledged video editors? As I mentioned to another commenter: can you show me an example of a full-featured, web-based video editor using AMP? I'm not sure if I can buy in that this…

I assume you mean video editing. Many reasons, but the top one in my opinion is having a single code base across all devices. I think it's a worthwhile goal, personally.

Sure, but this is just as achievable, if more agreeably challenging on the desktop as a platform as it is on the web.

I'm not sure if it's a particularly convincing axiom here for heavy payloads of web-apps, particularly when we're talking about simply delivering content to cite a singular code base for why a web application that would benefit from AMP (which was the central conceit of the actual blog post we're all here discussing today) needs to be 15MB heavy.

Well formed markup and smart content compression could accomplish the same thing.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#73

Post by adventured »

jmull wrote: post #49
askaboutit wrote: post #6

Wikipedia is a static delivery website. Of course it’s easy if all you’re delivering is static content. Try that with an ecommerce site where dynamic information is sent from sometimes multiple sources. It’s better to load it once and have a reactive site call just the necessary apis after. Calling everything over and over again in eCommerce is a pain for users. Unless you can afford a database and servers to be dist…

> Wikipedia is a static delivery website. What do you think all those little "Edit" buttons all over wikipedia do?

> What do you think all those little "Edit" buttons all over wikipedia do?

They take you into the CMS where you can produce more static content.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#74

Post by megy »

onion2k wrote: post #58
Solar19 wrote: post #13

The author says you can do these things anyway without AMP, but what he doesn't get is that web developers were not doing them. It took the nudge of AMP to get decent performance on the mobile web. He also failed to mention a key AMP rule: all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate…

I think if more web developers understood how browsers actually render a page we'd get much better web pages. In the case of CSS, the browser won't render until all the CSS files are loaded and parsed. Having lots of them is terrible for time-to-first-paint performance. That's reason enough to inline styles in the head and only have one CSS link on a page if you want something simple, or to use media queries in links…

Ok, except the advice has been to move CSS to files for a long time, so that they can be cached easily. That way other pages are loaded quickly, since they css file is already stored on the device.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#75

Post by geuis »

AMP is a fucking cancer on the web right now.

When you visit what you expect to be a search result url, it should take you to the server/site that was indexed. When AMP for launched, it didn’t even provide a link to the original site. It took a lot of people like me grousing and complaining before Google’s 17 tiers of product managers had enough meetings to even budge on that.

I honestly can’t tell you how so many sites were convinced to implement AMP on their sites. I could wave my hands and say everyone is stupid and just goes along with the latest shiny bullshit but that can’t be but a small part of the actual answer.

Supposedly Google isn’t factoring AMP pages into their search rankings yet, but given the positive signal of page speed (a good thing, generally) and them switching to a mobile first index, a natural direct side effect is that AMP pages will be ranked higher by default.

If Google were somehow automatically transforming sites you’d never hear the end of people complaining, especially content owners. Instead they convinced engineers and content creators to tie the rope on the hanging post themselves, jump off, and be happy about it.

I can’t speak too negatively of PWA. The ability to build offline web apps is actually pretty useful in some situations.

Overall I still firmly believe that a good search engine should deliver the most relevant links or content for what is being queried. Should a bad QA site get ranked higher than a high quality one just because the former delivers mobile-first AMP pages and the latter has a slightly bigger payload but has much more relevant content?

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#76

Post by [deleted] »

pandapower2 wrote: post #27

>I’m not saying practices promoted by AMP are bad or useless. They are good practices. But nothing stops you from following them in the regular web. Disagree. The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website. Something like a news website likely has 2-4+ analytics integrations, and a similar nu…

[deleted]

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#77

Post by dmitriid »

pandapower2 wrote: post #27

>I’m not saying practices promoted by AMP are bad or useless. They are good practices. But nothing stops you from following them in the regular web. Disagree. The most important feature of AMP is that it makes it impossible to add the kind of bloated crap that causes poor performance on something like a large media company website. Something like a news website likely has 2-4+ analytics integrations, and a similar nu…

I’ve yet to find an AMP page that downloads less than 1MB of crap for what edsentially id a dtatic text page (sometimes with images).

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#78

Post by quantummkv »

Solar19 wrote: post #13

The author says you can do these things anyway without AMP, but what he doesn't get is that web developers were not doing them. It took the nudge of AMP to get decent performance on the mobile web. He also failed to mention a key AMP rule: all CSS is in the head, a max of 50 KB. There is no external CSS at all. That's crucial. It reverses a persistent anti-pattern in web development that calls for a bunch of separate…

> AMP, or something even better, needs to be the default way to build websites.

No. We don't need AMP or something else. The existing tools are more than enough. What we need are actual, trained engineers/developers on the platform.

The real problem with web performance is that any random guy with questionable or non-existent knowledge thinks he can whip up a website by mixing any library he comes across. That is fine for a personal site or some random trivial web page. However we over glorify them and appoint them in critical jobs. And then we wonder why 21st century web is horrible. insert shocked pickachu meme in here

Can you imagine what would happen if we started appointing surgeons by putting random guys through a 1 month bootcamp which consists of showing them youtube video courses? We used to do something like this in the middle ages. We also had a surgery in that era with a 300% mortality rate.

What we need are standards on who can actively work at what positions/level based on their training/skills. Just like any other critical industry.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#79

Post by viraptor »

briandear wrote: post #63
viraptor wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have a very active community commenting and interacting around the items, you can definitely go almost entirely static, even in ecommerce. Regenerate pages after changes happen and you'll be fine. You'll still need dynamic search most likely, but even those can be pre-generated for many terms. (Your admin / content management part needs to be dynamic of course, but that's not customer-visible) If your cata…

> You'll still need dynamic search most likely, but even those can be pre-generated for many terms. Have you ever worked on a high scale e-commerce site? I have and what you are talking about is impractical and pretty much impossible. Products have multiple variants, photos for each variant. Various companion products that depend on what you already selected. Pricing options that can depend on quantities or packages.…

There are various types of ecommerce. Some will be harder to do, some easier, done impossible. Some are search heavy, some aren't.

I agree with the issues you're raising, but even then, you can make a lot of the site bypass dynamic rendering.

Re: Neither PWA nor AMP are needed to make a website load fast

#80

Post by 43920 »

robinanil wrote: post #41

At Tock we had been obsessed with page load performance since the beginning and I agree with the author. We avoided PWA mostly due to it's broken behavior. Often times we are faster than loading the same restaurant page on Google search. Out challenge has been that we have to load a lot of images, so we spent a lot of time optimizing everything around it and optimizing everything around it. From TLS1.3 to the CDN, to…

Sort of off-topic, but there seems to be a bug with the way search results work. If I click on "search", it shows me an option for " nearby", but if I click on that, I get results for a city that has the same name, but is in a completely different area.

edit: this also applies to the "near you" cards on the home page.

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