AMP: the missing controversy

> "let's do a standards-incompatible aggressively preloaded slimmed down page that will live on our ultra-fast CDN/cache servers".

How can it be standards incompatible if it works in existing standards compatible browsers?

> Also, can you see why web packages don't solve the problem (hint to start you thinking: not everyone can run their pre-rendered pages off of Google's CDN. Even Google's own AMP isn't fast if it's not preloaded from Google's cache)?

Did you read the Redfin article? The point isn't for you to run the CDN or do the prefetching, the point is, how do people find your site and articles? Either they find it through Google/Bing/Baidu/etc, social network sites (Twitter/Facebook), or aggregation sites (Reddit, HackerNews, etc). The point is, for large aggregation sites with a lot of traffic to roll out preloading on CDNs. So for example, Cloudflare already supports AMP-Cache, and Reddit could roll out prefetching if desired.

And you completely missed the point that, getting publishers to adopt AMP gets them to slim down their sites even if you don't use the AMP cache or preloading. Something everyone has been trying to get them to do for years, including Google, who has been trying to penalize slow sites for years (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140827025406-126344576-goog...)

So hurray for you making a slimmed down page, but you're not the target audience, the huge number of other sites that have for years, bloated the Web and haven't responded to previous attempts to force them to go on a diet are the target.

> How can it be standards incompatible if it works in existing standards compatible browsers?

You really have no idea how the web works, do you? Browsers do a best effort to display any page. Even if the HTML is totally absolutely invalid, the browser will go out of its way to display at least something.

The mere fact that something is displayed by a browser doesn't make it standards-compliant.

AMP is standards incompatible because:

- its HTML is not valid HTML 5 (just a few examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467873)

- whatever extensions to HTML 5 they bring are not a part of any HTML standard, past or present. And it doesn't look like Google is interested in making them a part of any future standard.

> So hurray for you making a slimmed down page, but you're not the target audience, the huge number of other sites that have for years

That's not the point, is it? Google will still penalise my page even if it's way slimmer than a standard AMP page. And since I cannot afford to run a Google-scale CDN, it will perform worse than an AMP page.

So here's what we have in the end:

- Google (and Google alone) decides what AMP will look like. There are no discussions with the web community at large or the standards committees.

- Google (and Google alone) decides that only AMP pages end up in its own proprietary AMP cache. (Other "big aggregators" may/will also decide that only AMP pages can be in their proprietary caches)

- Even if a web developer follows all of Google's performance tips (https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules) the page will still be penalised because it's not an AMP page (i.e.: not a page developed using whatever a big corp has decided, and running from a big corp's CDN/cache)

- Even Google's own page speed tools tell you that AMP is not fast, and yet everyone (even 100% optimised slimmed down pages) is penalised if you're not running the page from an overpowered private cache

A lot of mental gymnastics and total ignorance of how the web works goes into calling this an open, extensible web that will benefit everyone.