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AMP for email is bad

tutanota.com

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Re: AMP for email is bad

#21

Post by vanadium »

tholman wrote: post #15

There are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to s…

"Imagine you're building a site with one foot in 1999 and another foot in 2016, but instead of 4-5 browsers you have around 20 highly-idiosyncratic browsers past and present to deal with."

That's pretty much how I introduce people to email development, and AMP for email isn't going to solve for that in any meaningful way.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#22

Post by x3haloed »

I can't belive the neckbeard level in here. "I do all my web browsing with curl and vim. Nobody needs AMP!"

Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh.

AMP is not "bad" or "good". Get over yourselves and your moral peacocking and get back to measuring things objectively. Everyone who upvoted this crap needs to consider why. Is it because AMP fails to accomplish its goals? Or is it because you share a sentiment with the author -- that "Google and AMP are ruining lives and, even worse, the web, the holy web, and that they must be stopped in the name of the holy Linus, who set us free from the proprietary code, and... Where was I?" "God, you're the worst DM." "Yes. Yes I am."

Re: AMP for email is bad

#23

Post by ricardobeat »

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.

Side effects such as?

Re: AMP for email is bad

#24

Post by BoorishBears »

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.

This correction does little to refute the original point so...

Re: AMP for email is bad

#25

Post by [deleted] »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7
fock wrote: post #2

Maybe one should first ask: Is AMP currently good for anyone but GOOG?

I’ve only personally benefited from AMP in times when I was trying to read the news in very congested LTE situations (e.g. an indoor arena filled with spectators) so keeping the absolute number of requests down and aggressive preloading was helpful. I am seeing far fewer AMP sites today than before though - Google promised higher search results rankings in exchange for a modest amount of work to make websites AMP-com…

[deleted]

Re: AMP for email is bad

#26

Post by swiley »

tholman wrote: post #15

There are absolutely no standards at all when trying to code emails, it takes hours trying to make something that remotely resembles the same thing on every engine (Microsoft outlook rendering emails with their ms word engine, google doing all sorts of different things on desktops vs phones) - and hours more of testing and tweaking css and markup hacks to make them readable. Although this is another puzzle piece to s…

It’s a pain because no one wants it!

Emails are for text, if you have something to say you can write it out.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#27

Post by detaro »

x3haloed wrote: post #22

I can't belive the neckbeard level in here. "I do all my web browsing with curl and vim. Nobody needs AMP!" Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh. AMP is not "bad" or "good". Get over yourselves and your moral peacocking and get…

> Listen -- AMP is merely a set of guidelines and a framework to help developers make media-rich web content load fast. You can obviously achieve the same results without AMP, just like you can write a SPA without a framework. Duh.

Basically all criticism of AMP is about the fact that this is not true. If Google said "we prioritize fast pages, here's some guidelines and code on how to do that", that'd be fine. But they've tied features to using exactly their framework and nothing else.

Like AMP, but don't want to show 8 seconds of empty page to users without JS, or want to remove any of the other weird issues it had at times? Too bad, changing that code means it is not valid AMP anymore. Want to self-host the AMP source code? Too bad, not valid AMP anymore.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#28

Post by BoorishBears »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #17
fock wrote: post #2

Maybe one should first ask: Is AMP currently good for anyone but GOOG?

Really? Seems obviously good for everyone on an expensive mobile connection. Just like old-Opera's low bandwidth mode that proxies all requests through their servers. Never heard much bitching about that, btw. Just praise. It's kinda like an internet service that doesn't meter your WhatsApp data (very common here in Mexico): it's obviously useful to people, but it comes at an expensive price in the aggregate. Nobody…

For the longest time AMP pages straight up would not load on my iPhone if I was on mobile data.

It seems to have resolved itself sometime in the last year, but I still have amp pages occasionally fail to load.

Even when they do load, any seconds they save me are murdered when I have to spend an infuriating few seconds trying to get my address bar back.

And I love how before, long pressing and copying the url from the faux-address bar amp gives would copy the URL.

Now it copies a garbage-ified google URL, for tracking no doubt.

Apple should murder AMP on iOS. Don’t let it hide my address bar, show hideous urls, generally make its life difficult, this garbage is to further Google's goals.

I’m not even one of these wanna-be Stallmanists complaining about Google domination, that ship has sailed, and I welcome our Alphabetical overlords. But AMP is just a garbage technology that ruins UX and it needs to die.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#29

Post by qrbLPHiKpiux »

michaelmrose wrote: post #5
wffurr wrote: post #3

And the author completely disregards the elephant in the room. Why do websites slow themselves down with trackers, etc.? It pays to do so. Decrying that without presenting an alternative sustainable monetization model for the web is just pointless yelling.

I could probably make more money robbing a bank today than going to work. Nobody needs to provide an alternative sustainable business model to fuel my desire for sports cars and travel I just need to live with what I can make from legitimate work. Most of the web is either, cheap to run, paid for by other commercial activity, or crap and if it went away tomorrow because people could not pay for it by shoving their cr…

I have nothing constructive to add to this thread only that I really miss the web of the late 90s.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#30

Post by seieste »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #8
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…

> When you use google search with javascript enabled AMP results are both prioritized in the listing and pre-loaded in the background. Or Bing search or Baidu search or Yahoo! Japan search and so on. The whole point of AMP is that it can be safely preloaded and prerendered, making it faster than any other web page you can create for people coming from a link aggregator. One of the big advantages it has over Facebook…

AMP is slower for me because I have to press on my screen twice to get to the actual page I wanted to go to.

Hence AMP requires at least 0.5s between the time I click on a Google link and get to my real destination?

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