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AMP for email is bad

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Re: AMP for email is bad

#71

Post by joshuamorton »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
SquareWheel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMP isn't a subset of HTML, it's it's own proprietary fork of HTML. This is another misunderstanding. HTML allows custom tags. This is built into the spec. AMP is plain and regular, standards-compliant HTML.

I think you are misunderstanding my point. An img tag doesn't work on an AMP page. It has to be an amp-img. Every standard HTML tag is invalid in AMP content, as you must use a customized AMP flavor of HTML. Whether or not it returns valid as HTML markup isn't really relevant: The point is it's an entirely different, incompatible, markup, from what a normal browser knows how to interpret and use, and if your browser…

That's not true, only tags that make web requests or do dynamic things are amp'd. You still use div and button and style and span and whatnot.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#72

Post by andrewshadura »

captn3m0 wrote: post #64
radarsat1 wrote: post #36

I really wish the email standard was markdown instead of HTML. I only ever switch from text-only when I need to embed an image, and otherwise occasionally italics or whatever is useful. This could be taken care of with a basic markdown-like language, and avoid getting full HTML advertisements, etc. I really, really don't need your newsletter to be properly formatted in my mailbox, just send a link, I'll open it in th…

If Google really wanted to make the web fast, they would add native support for text/markdown mimetype in Chrome and ask publishers to just create .md files instead.

text/markdown is a bad idea because it's not backwards compatible. It should be text/plain; markup=markdown, since Markdown is perfectly readable without any software support.

See https://blog.freron.com/2011/thoughts-on-writing-emails-usin... for more thoughts on this topic.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#73

Post by derefr »

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…

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 Outlook 97’s HTML renderer that it borrowed from Word 97’s HTML editor.” Email clients stick to this because it’s a universal de-facto standard, and is still technically HTML. But it wouldn’t be AMP, since AMP specifies how a given blob of AMP should render in very fine detail. Standardizing on AMP for email would be one way of breaking free of the current legacy of email HTML rendering semantics.

There are other ways of doing that, but AMP is one of the only ones that does that while also specifying a packaging format for web-page archives that has MIME-compatible semantics (so that e.g. you can send all the media of a page embedded into the page’s envelope.)

Re: AMP for email is bad

#74

Post by SquareWheel »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #69
SquareWheel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AMP isn't a subset of HTML, it's it's own proprietary fork of HTML. This is another misunderstanding. HTML allows custom tags. This is built into the spec. AMP is plain and regular, standards-compliant HTML.

I think you are misunderstanding my point. An img tag doesn't work on an AMP page. It has to be an amp-img. Every standard HTML tag is invalid in AMP content, as you must use a customized AMP flavor of HTML. Whether or not it returns valid as HTML markup isn't really relevant: The point is it's an entirely different, incompatible, markup, from what a normal browser knows how to interpret and use, and if your browser…

There is an important difference between saying it is invalid html, and it is invalid amp markup. An img tag will work like normal. It just won't be a valid AMP page any longer.

>if your browser doesn't have JavaScript, it's not even going to know what any of those custom tags are, is it?

It wouldn't. tags are needed for that. But Javascript is a web standard, and this is the correct way to create new elements.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#75

Post by Alex3917 »

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…

When the author says the email protocol is easy it's a pretty big giveaway that they've never actually built anything involving email. Just getting email messages to display properly on the screen is many years of work.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#76

Post by ehnto »

swixm wrote: post #46
seieste wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Refusing to read the information you were looking for just because it is in an AMP page makes it look like you're following the "antigoogle" NetHack conduct.

As others are pointing out, AMP is often a poor substitute for the fully functional page. Like mobile sites used to be separate, barely functional versions of the desktop site, and Google penalized that behavior by deranking sites that had different content on mobile sites.

If I built my own version of an AMP page a few years ago, and served it without AMP, it would have been penalized. I don't know if that's still true, as I don't follow the carnival that is SEO anymore.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#77

Post by lern_too_spel »

seieste wrote: post #56
swixm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Refusing to read the information you were looking for just because it is in an AMP page makes it look like you're following the "antigoogle" NetHack conduct.

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 pages you click to the canonical version of.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#78

Post by jchw »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58
jchw wrote: post #48

Every thread about AMP on Hacker News goes exactly the same way. It’s annoying, repetitive. But here’s the thing: while I get criticisms about AMP for web, pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email. The author of this article keeps bringing up points about AMP for web as if they have anything to do with AMP for email. AMP for email basically does one thing: it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitra…

> 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 offer their users the ability to disable loading remote images, and other external requests.

While I can understand some concern regarding allowing email to do more, I don’t understand the adtech bits. If you could explain that in more concrete detail, I’d be appreciative. To be particular: what AMP elements or functionality would compromise user’s privacy?

Re: AMP for email is bad

#79

Post by lern_too_spel »

andreareina wrote: post #62
jchw wrote: post #48

Every thread about AMP on Hacker News goes exactly the same way. It’s annoying, repetitive. But here’s the thing: while I get criticisms about AMP for web, pretty much none of them apply to AMP for email. The author of this article keeps bringing up points about AMP for web as if they have anything to do with AMP for email. AMP for email basically does one thing: it enables interactive emails without allowing arbitra…

So now email clients need to implement a javascript engine as well as an html engine? For what benefit to users? At what cost to users? AMP for email solves a nonexistent problem.

Google Docs and Doodle have already shown why users want this.

Re: AMP for email is bad

#80

Post by paulie_a »

qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #29
michaelmrose wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Blink tags, shockwave, real player, stitched backgrounds, and design by tables. The web of the 90s was crap
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