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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with the AMP version?

Aside from the common dislike for AMP centralising everything on Google's servers, I also dislike AMP links for the same reason I dislike mobile links to sites when I'm using a desktop PC.

The AMP versions usually lose formatting and links, and are designed to be read on a small mobile screen. I'd rather have the full version when I have a big screen available.

Did you even click the link? It's not hosted on Google's server and it looks great. Much less clutter than the non-AMP version, and loads faster as well of course.

Normal website works fine without cookies and javascript. AMP version does not. It gives you a blank page. Thus, AMP is bad, since a simple HTML page like this one should never require javascript to just display the contents.

In this case I like the yellow block for the quoted content.

Somewhat controversially, AMP is what’s wrong.

Wait I thought we were all annoyed that AMP was being served by Google (at google.com even). At least that was my beef, that and clicking the X took me back to Google instead of to the actual site.

Self hosted AMP is just a lightweight version of the site isn't it?

The AMP version requires a script from cdn.ampproject.org to display any content. I'm extremely annoyed by this new craziness where a 3rd-party script/xhr is required to display the content/images. This is more than just sloppiness on the development side, this risks user privacy as well.

New craziness? People have been using third party hosts for bootstrap, jQuery, anything on cdnjs, fonts.com, etc forever

You yourself use recaptcha on the site in your profile and a gist script from GitHub on your blog

You missed the important part of that statement:

> a 3rd-party script/xhr is required to display the content

Way too many websites just stay blank when JS is disabled, even though HTML is very capable of displaying text.

It's interesting that people go out of their way to complain about their privacy being invaded by cameras, drones, the NSA snooping backbones, google, etc but most of us are fine with out browsers connecting to 61 different domains (CNN.com) to render a 3 paragraph news story.

You are right, but to be fair, I did migrate that website from Github so there are artifacts from the giant pile of mess that was my Jekyll config and I even wrote my own static generator (like the next webdev) to get rid of all the dependencies but this side-project never finished (I was experimenting with formatting/highlighting to inline gists as you can see in the last post but then I got bored).

I can't fight the spam bots myself so I have to hide my email behind that captcha for practical reasons (which is not a part of my site, it is a popup).

Other than that, there are nothing 3rd-party there. And everything loads pretty fast without any alien scripts (or any scripts at all for that matter).

The craziness is that more and more sites won't even render anymore without third-party javascript. Without bootstrap, jquery, fonts, etc, at least the page will still work, and it will work better because there's no bootstrap, jquery, fonts, etc.

Mind you, these are sites that can be served perfectly with a 1Kb HTML page + a bit of CSS. Not web apps or anything, where I understand you'd want to load a bunch of XHR requests.

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