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Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

theregister.com

131–140 of 238 posts

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really not. The concept of “your house, your rules” can be found in ancient Roman texts. Being a foreigner didn’t suddenly exempt you from the laws of the land.

> your house, your rules You're not in their "house". You're just communicating with someone who is. If some foreign government has a problem with that communication they should take it up with the party who is physically within their jurisdiction—not that I believe they have any just standing there either.

You’re trying to do business in another country with different rules. If you want to sell food into the EU, you need to comply with their food safety regulations.

Why does this magically change when someone utters the words “the internet?”

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What options or alternatives did you suggest to marketing so they could accomplish their goal?

None? I have no clues what marketings goal are and frankly I don't care. If they want to insert some junk.js into their web page they need at least to ensure it is legal.

If you work at the same company on the same product don’t you both have the same end goal?

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#133
post #9
post #4

The replacement they're whining about is "core web vitals" IE the metric you can view at[1]. This is what AMP should have been in the beginning and I was surprised they did something else, it made Google search unusable on mobile. [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en This means that your hand-coded-in-vim static pages will rank near the top.

There is one metric where hand-coded-in-vim pages tend to do poorly, and that's cumulative layout shift. If you have images on your page (a reasonable assumption) and just stick tags in there, you can get dinged on cumulative layout shift because the layout will shift as images get loaded. I use a somewhat hand-coded-in-vim approach, but there's some post-processing that adds width/height attributes to tags which mit…

I had no idea about this, thanks!

It's surprisingly hard to set up good images in a hand-coded-in-vim website. You're supposed to include multiple image sizes and set up the code for loading each in HTML. So what could have been simply adding an tag now turns into a chore involving ImageMagick.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#134
post #91

It's funny that Google says they care about performance, yet the number one reason for bad performance on many site is Google Adsense ads. Did no one in Ads team get the memo to optimize performance?

100% this. Maybe I've missed something in their documentation, but it's been incredibly frustrating getting their ads to not kill performance

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty unlikely. Do you have any information that backs this up?

Yes. Years of experience with AMP and measuring website performance on a very high traffic website.

Have you directly compared the live version against that in the AMP Cache?

The idea that PSI preloads the page before starting the test doesn't make much sense at all, and doesn't mesh with my own experiences (in the same space).

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#136
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. So the first problem is that people would end up optimizing for entirely the wrong thing. Rather than optimize for the machines and networks that are actually in use, you'd optimize for high CPU Linux servers with no GPU connected over high bandwidth and low latency networking. Not low CPU mobile phones over LTE or dodgy WiFi. Second, you wouldn't complain that it's an unfair advantage to pages in the Google AMP…

Then don’t go with the stupidest most naive way of benchmarking, and actually try to replicate some real-world scenarios? This would be utterly trivial for Google.

Synthetic benchmarking with actual end-user network conditions, or actual end-user browser+hardware combinations is in my opinion functionally impossible. (And you've excluded real world telemetry as an option). Just how do would you fairly benchmark Safari on iPhone performance on billions of web pages?

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#137
post #75
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, you're right that this is essentially Google making everyone eat their vegetables but isn't it a little wild that this single company has so much control over the internet that they can basically make sweeping decrees like this?

No, I don't think so. There are hundreds if not thousands of unique domains for nearly every single query. Very few of those are providing first-hand, unique information. Take Apple product announcements; there are hundreds of high-traffic blogs basically creating identical content rehashing a press release or writing posts about newly announced products. There has to be a way of prioritizing some of these sites over…

You're absolutely right that UX should have precedence for equal info. There's a reason why I like going to the slickly-made Verge instead of every other site for routine news like what was announced at a particular company's event. That, and I like their short summary videos.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#138

I've been working on core web vitals for the better part of a year at a major news outlet. I have seriously mixed feelings. There's probably an hour-long talk about this in me but briefly: - It's really nice and maybe unprecedented to have an alignment of business, user, eng, and seo goals. Google is using it's monopoly to change roadmap priorities across the industry. The web vitals themselves are unquestionably goo…

* The web vitals themselves are unquestionably good for the user* Fast pages are good, but Google is using their tools like Page Speed to push you to adopt Google’s ideas of fast, like using WebP for images. So now you might have a bunch of cruft in your page to support multiple image types. Also, as user, I hate lazy loading. I can scroll faster than images load. I’d rather everything load in the beginning, and have…

You can not scroll faster than images load. You can maybe jump via the scrollbar faster to a page position than images load, but that's it.

That's at least with the HTML5 async image standard in Firefox. It's up to the browser after all, so if yours loads images too slow the issue might be there. And sure, if the images are huge they will take a long time to load, but that's also covered by the core web vitals.

A site I built a while ago is a good test case for that imho, https://www.sustaphones.com/. Long list, many small images, loaded from a CDN. I can maybe provoke a flicker with the scrollbar, but not with regular scrolling.

Edit: That's for broadband. With a 56K modem or something that's of course a different story. But loading a bunch of images in advance on the modern web is also not a good option then.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unusual , no. Unjust , yes, and impractical besides. If (unlike me) you accept the legal fiction that a country's government "owns" everything within its self-proclaimed official borders, with all the corresponding rights of a property owner within that domain, then they can either block the communication at the border or impose requirements on those living within, provided that anyone who doesn't care to agree to th…

It’s unjust for a government to regulate what enters its borders from another country? So you’re suggesting that the U.K. should allow assault rifles to be sold from the USA, in spite of the fact they’re outright illegal to own inside the borders of the U.K. Why is it unjust when literally the entire U.K. population is in support of this position?

> Why is it unjust when literally the entire U.K. population is in support of this position?

Obviously not "literally the entire U.K. population" if someone in the U.K. isn't following the rule.

This is a complex subject and I'm not going to get into it here, but the Cliff's Notes version is basically that the U.K. government is not a party to this transaction, is not harmed by it, and does not represent (as in: having a formal, revocable agent/principal relationship with) anyone who is either a party to the transaction or harmed by it, and thus has no standing to interfere. The justice or injustice of the matter is unaffected by whether the government's interference would be popular.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#140
post #9
post #4

The replacement they're whining about is "core web vitals" IE the metric you can view at[1]. This is what AMP should have been in the beginning and I was surprised they did something else, it made Google search unusable on mobile. [1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en This means that your hand-coded-in-vim static pages will rank near the top.

There is one metric where hand-coded-in-vim pages tend to do poorly, and that's cumulative layout shift. If you have images on your page (a reasonable assumption) and just stick tags in there, you can get dinged on cumulative layout shift because the layout will shift as images get loaded. I use a somewhat hand-coded-in-vim approach, but there's some post-processing that adds width/height attributes to tags which mit…

Don’t even need the exact number just the aspect ratio.
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