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Comment by SimeVidas | Hacker News Reader

When I think “not the open web,” I think native apps (Android, iOS, etc.), I think internet censorship (a country blocking an entire website), I think fast lanes, zero-rating, and other ways ISPs are undermining net neutrality.

AMP is neither of those things. It’s a library and framework for creating web pages which are then hosted on the web, openly.

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> AMP is neither of those things. It’s a library and framework for creating web pages which are then hosted on the web, openly.

In practice it's a framework for hosting web pages on Google's domain. I haven't seen any amp sites outside of the google.com domain. To call google.com "the open web" is quite a stretch. I can't control anything about google.com, and I'm bound to Google's policies and practices when hosting content there. How is this open in any meaningful sense?

> In practice it's a framework for hosting web pages on Google's domain. I haven't seen any amp sites outside of the google.com domain.

Google isn't the only one that operates an AMP cache (IIRC, Microsoft, Twitter, and a couple others do), but if you get to an AMP page from Google results you'll get the version from Google’s cache.

The actual authoritative source is hosted wherever the publisher chooses, and any cache just caches that.

The AMP pages that are hosted on Google’s domain, are also hosted on the publisher’s own domain. In fact, that’s a requirement, since what Google hosts is an “AMP Cache”—it copies the AMP pages from the publisher’s websites.

Which hosting providers would qualify as open then? You are bound by the policies and practices of the owner anywhere you host your content.

Generally, you can switch hosting providers. When there's only one AMP host, you're stuck with them forever.

Well yeah, if you create your own definitions of things it's not surprising that Amp doesn't meet them.

When I think of "not the open web", I think of walled gardens like Facebook, Apple, and Amp.

You lost me - a walled garden has to have a "wall" by definition. What's the wall on AMP?

How do you host an AMP page on your own site?

An AMP page is just HTML and CSS, so you host it like any other web page.

What’s the benefit of creating an “AMP page” instead of just creating a non bloated HTML page?

AMP is an explicit subset of HTML, CSS and JavaScript aimed at reducing bloat. Of course you could just do this yourself is you think you know a better subset.

What's the modern state of web development come to that people need something like AMP to guide then into creating fast loading web pages?

Identifying an explicit subset of an expressive language that has performance/analysis properties you desire is an absolutely fine thing to do. In fact it's intelligent. Are you implying it's bad in some way?

The site we are on right now doesn't use AMP and doesn't seem to have any problems with performance....

Okay, but identifying an explicit subset of a language is a totally neutral technical decision and is very often a good idea.

You are confusing AMP pages with AMP Cache.

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