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CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

timkadlec.com

81–90 of 97 posts

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#81
post #70

I can't take AMP seriously as long as it forces web sites to include resources from Google. That basically turns all AMP web pages into something that Google can track. Google can track enough of the web already, thankyouverymuch. If your "standard" proposal starts with telling me I have to include content from a specific URL, you already lost me as a potential proponent. I also happen to disagree with "all CSS needs…

Aren't the AMP pages anyway delivered from the Google servers to the users? Then Google can track them anyway?

I'm just a casual observer and that's just how I understood the idea.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#82
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having browsers intelligently render `text/markdown` sounds like a great idea. And while we're waiting on the browser implementation, maybe we can find some sort of temporary workaround to send a markdown parser to the client?

Maybe we could just send the raw markdown anyway - it might not be pretty on all clients, but it should be _legible_ on all clients. Or maybe we could send markdown if the user agent included text/markdown in the request's Accept header, and pipe it through a markdown->HTML filter otherwise. I would love to see some kind of native markdown support on the web.

A web search turned up this Firefox plugin, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-view..., are there other good ones?

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#83
post #70

I can't take AMP seriously as long as it forces web sites to include resources from Google. That basically turns all AMP web pages into something that Google can track. Google can track enough of the web already, thankyouverymuch. If your "standard" proposal starts with telling me I have to include content from a specific URL, you already lost me as a potential proponent. I also happen to disagree with "all CSS needs…

I don't think it forces you to include resources from Google. I think the 2 primary reason Google asks you to include a specific javascript script [1] are :

1 - Lazy & Prioritized asset loading logic

2 - Loading assets from cache

Regarding the lazy & prioritized asset loading, the script [2] shouldn't be relying on some Google specific stuff. Since the project is open source, anyone can take a look and get an answer.

Regarding the loading from Google's cache: I haven't dug that much into it, but it's supposedly possible to write your own cache service (instead of relying on the currently free google CDN). Google provided the API and the URL format to so that it should be doable [3]. My assumption is that you can then create your own script, with the cache server URL changed to your own instead of Google's in a simple config file[4].

The question is then: by doing so (and effectively cutting any ties with Google's servers) will your page still be recognized as AMP by Google search engine? It will still reap the actual perf benefits (assuming your CDN does not suck), but if Google's crawler really wants that [1] to be present (and it should not), you wouldn't get the SEO benefits.

[1]

    
[2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

[3] https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/

[4] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/c44a48fbb1dbd0de0...

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa whoa whoa, what's some fat cat solution right there! Just use a http header for your content and you're set.

The url should contain all the information so we don't have to make a HTTP request.

I think most news sites implemented this years ago.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#85
post #70

I can't take AMP seriously as long as it forces web sites to include resources from Google. That basically turns all AMP web pages into something that Google can track. Google can track enough of the web already, thankyouverymuch. If your "standard" proposal starts with telling me I have to include content from a specific URL, you already lost me as a potential proponent. I also happen to disagree with "all CSS needs…

That basically turns all AMP web pages into something that Google can track. Google can track enough of the web already, thankyouverymuch.

The point is to be able to track requests with javascript (or just Google Analytics, really) blocked.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#86

I'm much happier to see this. My concern with AMP has always been that it removes incentives for browsers to get faster, because if most of the content is using AMP there's no point in optimizing important things. Having a multi-vendor solution gives us non-Chrome browser vendors a voice at the table. (To give a concrete example, why bother with optimizing layout-affecting animations to run off the main thread if AMP…

AMP is for news pages, stuff is one page away from Search. Browsers still work to optimize the overall experience for web apps and full sites.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#87
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really bandwidth that causes the issue. Javascript is just really slow, both in parsing and execution. According to Chrome dev tools, parsing jquery takes 20ms on my 4.4 GHz desktop CPU. Now imagine how long that takes on a mid-range smartphone. Then add in a dozen other javascript libraries and shims and polyfills and the site is barely usable.

jQuery is a large library. If it were modular and developers used only the code they need it would be faster to parse. But I doubt the bottleneck is JS code. The problem is that web sites are not optimized (some frontend developers think that writing a CSS stylesheet for narrow screen is enough) and they include a lot of resources (including trackers, advertisement, spying social network buttons I never click). Some…

You can download a custom bundle of jquery from the source. But then it won't be shared with other websites. The solution is for browsers to cache common libraries and not try to load these resources per page.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#88
post #86

I'm much happier to see this. My concern with AMP has always been that it removes incentives for browsers to get faster, because if most of the content is using AMP there's no point in optimizing important things. Having a multi-vendor solution gives us non-Chrome browser vendors a voice at the table. (To give a concrete example, why bother with optimizing layout-affecting animations to run off the main thread if AMP…

AMP is for news pages, stuff is one page away from Search. Browsers still work to optimize the overall experience for web apps and full sites.

1. Animations have their place on news sites.

2. I'm not just talking about animations: things like parallel layout are also useful for static sites.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#89
post #81
post #70

I can't take AMP seriously as long as it forces web sites to include resources from Google. That basically turns all AMP web pages into something that Google can track. Google can track enough of the web already, thankyouverymuch. If your "standard" proposal starts with telling me I have to include content from a specific URL, you already lost me as a potential proponent. I also happen to disagree with "all CSS needs…

Aren't the AMP pages anyway delivered from the Google servers to the users? Then Google can track them anyway? I'm just a casual observer and that's just how I understood the idea.

AMP pages are served from the publisher's server as usual, but Google can easily direct their users to their cache instead of the official site. Every AMP page also includes JavaScript hosted by Google, so Google gets pinged every time someone visits an AMP page, even if it wasn't through their cache.

Re: CPP: A Standardized Alternative to AMP

#90
post #43

Isn't there a better alternative to an abbreviation that's already widely used in the software engineering context?

Search engines already deal just fine with context. Just type in “cpp language” or “cpp html,” respectively. I think everyone keeps making name collisions to be a much bigger deal than they are in reality.

cpp html: http://imgur.com/gV3dMI9

It's going to take significant momentum to displace "CPP" in the appropriate computing contexts.

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