[stetrain]

If AMP were just a high-performance subset spec of JS/HTML that Google gave a pagerank boost to I think it would be viewed pretty favorably.

The main issues seem to be around the caching features, which to allow even simple hit-count analytics requires sending analytics calls through some third party (usually Google). As a site owner you can’t do no-js analytics because you can’t even check server logs for page hit counts.

There are also still some weird details where the interaction on those pages (like scrolling) does not always feel native (it isn’t) and sharing the URL sends you to the hosted cache not the author’s site.

I’d be all in favor of something inspired by AMP that is just a test of “This page is a simple, fast-loading, no-hijacking web document”

[Kalium]

Speaking only, solely, and specifically as a user... why do I care if the content is in an integrity-checked hosted cache or if the site owner has analytics? Neither is important to the experience of accessing the content.

The problem with simple, fast-loading, no-hijacking web documents is that history shows quite clearly that they don't stay that way for long. Every single website owner could adopt that standard today. Every single website owner has had that same chance every day for the past two decades. We're still not there.

[labcomputer]

Speaking solely as as a user, because I don’t want to use Google’s fucking cache just to read a damn web page. And the scrolling sucks.

And why the fuck is it so hard to just get the canonical URL for the page? Seriously, if google had been just a little less aggressive about preventing users from leaving their little AMP ecosystem, it might have taken off.

[stetrain]

> The problem with simple, fast-loading, no-hijacking web documents is that history shows quite clearly that they don't stay that way for long. Every single website owner could adopt that standard today. Every single website owner has had that same chance every day for the past two decades. We're still not there.

They wouldn't be adopting AMP either except Google put their market weight behind it and said you should adopt AMP if you don't want to be punished in search results.

[ravenstine]

Users don't always know what's good for them.

[ec109685]

To achieve all the speed possible from AMP, requires the ability to safely pre-render the content on the device before the user clicks.

[stetrain]

I think modern phone processors, as limited as they are, could be pretty fast at rendering classic HTML and CSS. I know we want more from our webpages now, but the rendering as a static image is part of what makes AMP feel so weird and not like a normal webpage.

[ec109685]

It’s not a static image. It gets rendered into an iframe they swap in, which is only possible because they control the html rendered given the constraints of the amp format.

[stetrain]

But is that really necessary?

HN for example loads quite fast on mobile. I don’t think there is anything about client-rendered HTML and CSS that can’t be adequately fast even on fairly restricted clients.

Of course you can slow things down with advanced features, my point was that a google-led test for certified “Fast Webpages” that get promoted in search results could have most of the positive impacts of AMP without the strange complexities.