WordPress Sites Now Support Google’s AMP to Make Mobile Pages Load Faster
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Right now AMP is under heavy development and lots of changes are being made very quickly. That mandatory script loads other resources from the same domain on an as-needed basis, which is a crucial aspect of how AMP is designed to work. I don't know if the v1 release will include a distribution package for self-hosting, but it's not too much of a stretch to believe they've decided to go with a central CDN just to simplify development for the early stages of the project.
At any rate, this is no worse in principle than the Google Analytics scripts everybody includes on every page everywhere, so it's mostly just a bunch of FUD.
Want to embed content from another site? Great! You can choose from <amp-twitter>, <amp-facebook>, <amp-instagram>, <amp-pinterest>, or <amp-youtube>.
Building an advertising startup? Hooray! I hope you're one of the dozen whitelisted ad networks that <amp-ad> allows.
In Russia or China? Maybe Google will deign to implement <amp-vk> and <amp-sinaweibo> if we're sufficiently humble.
This is not the Web I want.
And please, please tell me what's wrong with using e.g. <amp-youtube>? It's just a web component! All it does is what you want it to do, and if it doesn't do what you want then either you shouldn't do that, or you can just submit a PR.
The whole point of AMP is 1) make sure the developer doesn't do anything that'll make the page load unnecessarily slowly or repaint/relayout unnecessarily and 2) make it way easier for the developer to accomplish #1 because all you have to do is type <amp-youtube>.
AMP is no different from, say, jQuery, or React, or Angular. It's a different way of doing things, but it's not a "gatekeeper" on the web. It's just another option, one more tool in your belt, if you so choose.
Who gets to decide which pull requests get accepted? What if I wanted to create an amp component for my network with a userbase of two people?
See https://medium.com/@cramforce/2016-will-be-the-year-of-concu... for the long game as to how to build such things in AMP without iframes.
The project is exclusively governed by three Google employees, listed at https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/GOVERNANCE..., all contributions are at their discretion.
All contributors must sign a legally binding licensing agreement with Google which includes a patent grant, per https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/CONTRIBUTI....
The Web is powerful because you don't have to ask permission. AMP is not cut from that cloth.
And CLA's aren't fun, but they're hardly new, either.[1]
If you don't like that it's Google, that's fine, but at least be honest with yourself about it. But unless you've submitted a PR or can cite a PR (on any Google OSS repo at all) that they've rejected purely on the basis that Google is somehow doing wrong by the developers, then what are we even talking about?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement#...
Right. Looking at this whole thing humorously, it seems like the uproar is over AMP is developers getting angry at a tool designed to prevent them from shooting themselves in the foot, for removing their ability to shoot themselves in the foot :)
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Devices
Open source means there's no such thing as a "Gatekeeper". As with every other open source project ever, you can just fork it. How many open source projects today are forked from their original repo because a large enough portion of the users and developers disagreed with the ones in control?
Honestly, this argument is just silly. https://developers.google.com/open-source/projects read that list and name one time where Google abused the control they had over the project they created. They already have a good track record for open source. This "gatekeeper" nonsense is just a bunch of unnecessary FUD.
And wait for google to accept it at their own discretion. That's exactly what a gatekeeper is.
This is a rather blind comment. Not everyone uses Google Analytics and those that do have actively chosen to do so. Plus, Google Analytics is inherently tied to Google services so there are no privacy or control issues.
AMP seems to be intended more as an open toolkit more akin to Bootstrap or jQuery. Requiring that AMP's scripts be loaded from a Google CDN is like saying you can't load jQuery or Bootstrap from anywhere but their CDNs. Some developers want to strictly control where their code is hosted for various reasons and Google isn't allowing them to do that.
Some developers also want to control who can and can't log their visitors. Google isn't allowing them to do that in this case. Anything that loads that script can be logged by Google.
Certainly not FUD.
When one company such as Facebook decides to launch a very privacy-intrusive service, people are like "Oh, no! We must support Google's very privacy intrusive-service so Facebook doesn't win!" - just like people saying "we must not let the pro-corporate Republicans win, so we must support the pro-corporate Democrats".
It's such a race to the bottom. How about we reject both? (in both cases).
The nice thing about a project like AMP is that it's a slow-moving target & all AMP pages fetch from the same URLs. That makes it easy for a tool like Decentraleyes to cache all of the AMP assets, resulting in even more speed & a privacy benefit.
- Default page: 74 requests, 1983kB, 2.98 in Firefox
- Adding amp/ at the end: 14 requests, 464kB, 0.51s in Firefox
Good! And sad it's not the default :-/
EDIT: after proper reading of the consequences, of course it's not the default. Indulgent readers will correct the above sentence as "hope we're moving to this kind of performance by default."
[1] http://blog.longreads.com/2016/02/18/the-freelancers-roundta...
> And you don’t lose much as AMP markup supports a wide range of features. For instance, AMP has worked with ad networks, such as Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick and AdSense, to create optimized tags for mobile pages. So you can still put ad tags in your AMP-enabled pages. Similarly, you can add analytics tools. But these JavaScript calls will be optimized.
I've never been in the work of dealing with ads though now that I think about it, that probably is one of the key things that the average, devoted content-creator would care about.
But I do think this is a bit underplayed:
> As for all the things that usually slow down web pages today, such as embeds, JavaScript-heavy content or Flash, WordPress strips out this content from the AMP pages. Comments are also omitted by default.
So...YouTube videos and things like embeddable Google Maps are not allowed? I was assuming "no"...because that is Google's bottom line...(also, they're whitelisted in the spec's extensions [1]). And I know the anti-comments-section sentiment is strong in the media industry, but kind of weird to see "oh yeah, no comments" as an afterthought. I'm assuming that means no WordPress comments (which come built-in with a standard WP install)...but what about Disqus and Facebook? There are more than a few media companies in which comment sections are more than trivially important.
[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...
google search will funnel users to amp-enabled pages, so anybody /not/ on the amp train will suffer. In that way it is a walled garden. It's google's version of becoming a portal.
How does google make money off of this?
Isn't AMP intended to compete with the likes of Facebook Instant Pages?
At the same time, Google thrives by returning high quality search results. It also depends heavily on web over native. For the web to stay relevant on mobile, it needs to meet some minimum expectations met by native experiences.
I frequently find fault with the websites I arrive at through Google because of shitty performance and irritatingly obtrusive advertising. There's more to mobile friendliness than a responsive CSS grid system and publishers need to realise that.
While I wouldn't argue that there isn't a massive amount of god-awful javascript being written today, but why does a third party, private company get to determine what is or isn't "excessive and crappy" on someone's own website? This sounds like a slippery slope to me.
I develop for a dozen or more totally custom Wordpress sites for my job and the effect this will have on us is precisely zero.
More importantly, this is a band-aid fix for the problem.
http://searchengineland.com/get-started-accelerated-mobile-p...
"More than likely, simply installing the WordPress plugin will not be enough, and you will have to go through and validate all of the pages you’d like to benefit from Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Depending on how your articles are formatted, you may need to make some changes in order to get the AMP pages to validate. The most common problems I personally experienced were with specifying height and width attributes for images and correcting old YouTube embed codes that weren’t using https."
There are some developers working on a few other plugins. I found this PageFrog plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/pagefrog/ which AMPs your page but includes a bunch of other stuff.
Particularly PageFrog comes bundled with Facebook Instant Articles support along with configurations for ads and analytics, which seems to be missing from the official WP plugin.
Oh hey let's load up your webpages with all this cr*p by default, tons of javascript, css, external files, fonts, headers, footers useless markup.
Oh hey, let's use this plugin to strip all that out.
How about not putting it in there in the first place.
Let's look at the first lines of WordPress's default template:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
Why dir and lang if you don't really know what language the content is in? We now have the funny situation that most non-English pages wrongly declare lang="en-US" because W3C evangelists told template authors that lang is really important, rendering the attribute completely useless.
What the heck is profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" supposed to do?
As for the "lang" attribute, it is set to the language chosen when WordPress was installed.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en" class="no-js"> <head>
I checked back to Twenty Fourteen and didn't see the lines you referenced. Regardless, it's a silly argument, the default themes are "reference" themes, meant to show off all the features WordPress offers and of course don't represent all WP themes.
A significant amount of WordPress related overhead would disappear if developers would keep resources to a minimum and provide a way to turn them off without writing additional code. Or if there was some built in system that tried to bundle together the CSS and JS files.