I still find the whole project dispiriting for several reasons:
1. Forking HTML: They’re now forming a defacto standards body on top of the W3C and WHATWG. (HTML is now forked 3 ways, for those keeping score.) We now are supposed to implement either (a) HTML + AMP, or (b) AMP alone (which is what the project has advocated for). Either way, that sucks as a developer and for the web. AMP team talks about AMP both being the future for everything always, and a mere stop gap that will enable better, native web tech. Which is it? It’s a mess.
2. Engineering-is-always-the-answer ideology: Ideologically, I dislike the “What the web needs is more corporate-driven engineering”. The whole reason the project exists is to fend off Facebook and native apps like Apple News. (It’d be better named FoF-HTML.) That’s the corporate side. And the way to do that was to massively overengineer solutions to problems that could have been addressed largely through SEO incentives (treat it as a spam problem) and left things like URLs (!) intact. Instead we’ll be left with years of AMP detritus that’s going to pollute the web for who knows how long. It’s all corporation-driven engineering and no spirit or science. No one is actually studying if these overengineered micro-solutions actually matter. All we need is more engineering!
3. Picking winners: Google used its own market dominance to bless AMP as the web framework of the future. It could have worked on common standards; it could have created other incentives, but it chose not too. Imagine if Microsoft actually succeeded in creating some kind of MS-HTML in the 90s or 00s. Thus there’s no market-driven competition for Google’s over-engineered solutions.
4. The cognitive dissonance inherent in the project: It’s an “open source” project that was born out of Google’s corporate interests. It has a public tech lead, but the actual Google exec above him responsible for the project doesn’t respond to anyone or answer anything. They cherry pick contributor stats to mislead the actual amount of Google-driven involvement. They desperately want it to be this thing of pure intentions for the benefit of the web and have us all singing kumbaya, but fundamentally it’s the product of a corporation acting in its short term competitive interests and using whatever engineering it has as its disposal to achieve those ends.
5. I still hate the UX. Reader mode support has improved but can be hit-or-miss, URLs are still broken and will be for years, and frankly I want to go to the actual web site and use Reader mode if necessary, rather than read the web through Google’s faux news reader. While developers have to maintain multiple versions of their code base (AMP & responsive HTML) things are going to break.
And all this for what? Slightly faster page loading and Google Web Reader experience, so Google can stick it to Facebook somehow? Is there any data on people using the web more instead of apps en masse now AMP is a thing? What %? And does that make forking the web worth it? I guess we’ll never know.
It’s such a shame.
[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623