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.
You ignored the safely qualifier. You would deanonymize a user to the publisher and the third party trackers on their page even if the user never clicks through to visit the page.
Thanks for your comment. I wasn't trying to bait any downvotes though. I have no desire to be downvoted. I was frustrating that another user was being incorrectly downvoted and ganged up on simply for explaining how something worked, and I was trying to defend them.
I tried editing the comment before I went to bed to soften it but HN would not allow me to do so. If that were possible, I don't think we'd be having this chat.
Other users in this thread have similarly been flagged simply for explaining how AMP works. I'd ask that you review the other flagged comments in this thread to review if they were done in respect to the site guidelines as well.
>Starting with google: AMP does not actually make loading any faster. Google just uses it's search monopoly to make it seem so.
This is a complete misunderstanding of how AMP works. Google isn't abusing a monopoly to make AMP-pages appear artificially faster; they actually are faster. That's because they're safe to preload by design, as lern_too_spel explained already.
The monopoly comment makes even less sense when you consider that other search engines do the same, and even host their own AMP caches.
Most people here disagree with you, hence why you’ll be down voted. Would AMP be used if it wasn’t for the news carousel - nope - so Google is definitely using their position to embrace and extend open standards.
>Most people here disagree with you, hence why you’ll be down voted.
No doubt. And it's really unfortunate that bias is trumping facts in this case.
>Google is definitely using their position to embrace and extend open standards.
There's nothing wrong with embracing or extending technologies. WebComponents, in this case. But if you're hinting at a third step then I'm sorry but open-source by definition cannot be extinguished.
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.
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.
You ignored the safely qualifier. You would deanonymize a user to the publisher and the third party trackers on their page even if the user never clicks through to visit the page.