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AMP for email is bad

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Re: AMP for email is bad

#101

Post by judge2020 »

emayljames wrote: post #91
joshuamorton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you one of the hundreds of millions of people who browses the internet primarily on a 3g or slower mobile connection in Asia?

This would largely be a good case if not for the fact that it is pushed on everyone, everywhere; without a choice.

Western sites implementing amp (in terms of the general "web" amp) will likely influence local eastern websites to also implement it, along with the notion that "amp gets you to the front page of google results". As an eastern website, the cost to implement it is probably extremely low with plugins and companies [Cloudflare] that do it for you, so it makes sense to click a button and reap the rewards of letting Google's plans play out.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#102

Post by untog »

dheera wrote: post #94
Kamshak wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMP does not actually make loading any faster Every AMP link i click on google loads crazy fast. I don't know why the implementation details or google's incentivizing it would make this not count for some reason. I don't like what amp is doing to the web either but the user experience is really good, pages do load much quicker than your average page and I find myself preferring them a lot over the uncertainty and f…

Less JavaScript bloat, I think. AMP is mostly static content. Plain HTML and one CSS file (read: one, not five, not ten CSS files) minus the JavaScript bloat would also load insanely fast. It doesn't have to be AMP. Try the basic HTML verson of Gmail -- it loads about 5-10X faster than the AJAX version.

> Less JavaScript bloat, I think. AMP is mostly static content.

That's actually completely untrue. Every AMP component is a web component and requires JavaScript in order to run at all. And many have their own .js file powering it. You literally can't use an tag on an AMP page. You have to use , which has a JS dependency.

OP is right, the primary reason AMP is fast is because Google is preloading the page in the background. AMP pages themselves aren't all that static, or really all that bandwidth efficient.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#103

Post by comex »

superkuh wrote: post #6

AMP is bad for everything. To be clear, this starts by it not being good for anything. Like on the web the form of AMP used by Google and Cloudflare. Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes…

> Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so. When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. This makes up the entire increase in load time you perceive. AMP pages not pre-loaded by google are just as slow to load.

You're missing the part where AMP's sandboxed design is required for Google to be able to safely pre-load results, which it can only do on its own origin due to browser restrictions. Which is one of the main reasons that AMP exists in the first place.

It's a nasty hack, but effective. The Web Packaging standard (also Google's work) might remove the need for it, when it's implemented in browsers... someday. Though with Mozilla against it, who knows what will happen.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#104

Post by millstone »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #77
seieste wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to a Reddit AMP page? Can’t upvote the post or comments or see your messages. Go to a wordpress AMP site? Can’t comment or access many comments. A lot of features aren’t present in AMP, so often I don’t want the AMP version. Sure, at some point AMP can implement all those things, but eventually AMP just becomes a parallel HTML standard, when the only speed benefit comes from caching. It makes no sense to anyone bu…

That's Google's fault for preferring a less relevant page, like showing a crippled mobile page instead of a user-preferred desktop page, not a problem with AMP. You would have the same problem with an Apple News article that you wanted to comment on and would have no escape hatch. In this case, Google (or any of the other AMP-implementing search engines) can personalize the results based on which publishers' AMP page…

They could start by allowing users to disable AMP at all.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#105

Post by ricardobeat »

SquareWheel wrote: post #50
ricardobeat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side effects such as?

Anything that could be affected by prerender[1]. Analytics and statcounters, but also state changes executed by visiting a page. It'd be quite problematic to load www.example.com/delete-account/confirm, for example. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-hints/#dfn-prerender

You are right about analytics, but that's an extremely easy problem to solve - simply disregard stats coming from the search engine bot. In fact both Chrome and Safari currently have a prefetch feature that I think is enabled by default, that's clearly not an issue.

For state, I don't see the connection to AMP here. RFC 7231 which defines the HTTP protocol specifically states that GET is idempotent, and should not cause any state changes in the server. The majority of servers conform to that, and if they don't, it's a bug with worse consequences than messing up prefetch.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#106

Post by SquareWheel »

ricardobeat wrote: post #105
SquareWheel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that could be affected by prerender[1]. Analytics and statcounters, but also state changes executed by visiting a page. It'd be quite problematic to load www.example.com/delete-account/confirm, for example. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-hints/#dfn-prerender

You are right about analytics, but that's an extremely easy problem to solve - simply disregard stats coming from the search engine bot. In fact both Chrome and Safari currently have a prefetch feature that I think is enabled by default, that's clearly not an issue. For state, I don't see the connection to AMP here. RFC 7231 which defines the HTTP protocol specifically states that GET is idempotent, and should not ca…

Unfortunately I think you're being a little too optimistic. The reality I've seen is that GET is used for all sorts of things, including state changes and irreversible consequences.

Analytics could check for useragent (and probably already does), but it just introduces a lot of noise.

Plus the other concern is that it'd be a huge privacy issue to have analytics being triggered just by performing related searches.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#107

Post by [deleted] »

itslennysfault wrote: post #85
derefr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m assuming you run an ad-blocker? Because the main difference in loading time is seen between a webpage with regular ads, and a webpage with ads that are forced to use the AMP ad framework. Without ads, sure, the difference in total latency before DOMContentLoaded is negligible. > But it certainly doesn’t have any purpose. “HTML” email is actually “email that renders HTML and CSS according to the semantics of Outlo…

Seems like a solution looking for a problem. The internet is plenty fast enough for loading simple news/blog posts. I haven't found find myself thinking "geeze I wish this article would load faster" in a long time.

[deleted]

Re: AMP for email is bad

#108

Post by benatkin »

jchw wrote: post #78
TeMPOraL wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email It seems they do, though. Both amp4web and amp4mail are attempts at taking old, established, and perfectly good elements of the Internet, and turning them into something that serves the interests of the adtech industry, at the expense of users. > it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitrary code It also conveniently enables extra advertising and tracking,…

Email tracking in AMP is, as far as I know, roughly identical to without AMP. To quote the official AMP documentation: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/ema... >AMPHTML allows tracking email opens with pixel tracking techniques, same as regular HTML emails. Any user-initiated requests for data from external services will also indicate the user is interacting with the message. Email clients may…

amp-analytics is disabled in AMP for email now, but it seems likely they would enable it in the future. This would mean that clicks that don't load a new page but expand an accordion, jump to a part of the page, or switch to a new tab, could be tracked, and conceivably it could be linked to a user account.

So, at the moment, AMP for email is similar to regular HTML emails, but AMP lays the groundwork for more in-depth snooping into reading of emails.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#109

Post by cromwellian »

josteink wrote: post #51
tpetry wrote: post #37

AMP for email is targeting a completely different topic than the issues listed here and in the article. And i am shocked everybody is simply not seeing them with their amp4web hate. Amp for email is completely different than amp for web and is a very good solution: 1. Coding emails is really really hard. Every client is rendering emails differently, and Outlook is a beast with every version rendering differently. Amp…

> Email is completely different than the web. You cant do more than basic html like displaying text and pictures. Embedding videos? Slideshows for products? Interactivity like forms? Display realtime information? EVERYTHING IS NOT POSSIBLE! But it will be with amp4email. This alone is the reason I oppose AMP email. I want email to be a simple, static text-based communication platform. None of that full HTML applicati…

Email already has HTML in it and has for decades, hell, there were startups dedicated to it like Zaplets et al.

AMP doesn't enable HTML email, it was already enabled by Outlook 97.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#110

Post by dang »

SquareWheel wrote: post #13
sametmax wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do that with regular HTML. Google crawling everything would easily let them know if a page is light and easy to preload, giving and incentive to web dev to make it so, instead of creating a lock in solution.

AMP can be preloaded because it's designed to be preloaded. Regular HTML pages have side effects that can't be accounted for. lern_too_spel is right. That is literally what AMP was built for. Let's watch as HN downvotes the correction while upvoting the misinformation in the top-comment. edit: Downvote and flag. Very disappointing.

Your comment was correctly flagged for breaking the site guidelines. Downvote-baiting is equal parts tedious and supercilious, and is off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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