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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

[I work at Cloudflare]

It's hard to build a great website, particularly one which works well on mobile. AMP as a web framework makes it easier. There's nothing about that value it which is intrinsically linked to any particular way of rendering AMP, a good chunk of the web would be better off building on AMP independent of Google. That doesn't mean every site should, there are developers and teams who are capable and willing to build great sites and we support their right to not have to use AMP. The need to use AMP-the-framework to get instant loading is hopefully a temporary one partially fixed by signed exchanges.

The AMP cache is also made much less concerning and painful for users through the use of signed exchanges. By ensuring the content is what was provided by the origin we believe the Internet is becoming a more trustworthy place, opening the door to sites being able to be served from wherever they will be most performant.

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[I know, but thanks for disclosing. :)]

The problem is, there really isn't an "AMP independent of Google", as Google's implementation is the only thing that matters, due to Search and Chrome. Supporting Google's proprietary fork of HTML is more or less supporting that entire structure, and it is inherently harmful. Whilst they have some notion of "governance" for the project, the plurality of participants are Google and they've confirmed that Google isn't really beholden to follow the project's governance with the implementations they put into their own products anyways.

For the most part, AMP is a subset of HTML with proprietary tags, but could be easily implemented in normal HTML. The only reason to implement AMP is to format your website to be compatible with Google's demands for special treatment in Search. (A benefit that, while publishers may aspire for today, becomes increasingly useless as the entire Internet is forced over to the same proprietary format.)

Various blogs have covered samples of how loading AMP is actually worse than loading their own websites in a lot of cases, but they're forced to implement it anyways because of that Google Search incentive. Surely the correct solution for mobile developers is to teach people to use restraint in piling on extra crud, not bootstrap some extra crud that prevents them from using any other crud.

And essentially, from the responses here and in almost every previous discussion about AMP, and literally Twitter feeds made just to retweet examples of AMP hatred: Nobody wants this. Everyone who wants it is using it because they have no choice. It's forced on publishers to maintain competitiveness in search, and it's forced on users who have no way to decline.

Probably what ground my gears the most about your blog, to be honest, is the cheerful, supportive tone for what is inherently a harmful technology that was implemented in a closed fashion. Compare to how FastMail acknowledged that they may have to support AMP for Email, whom I'm not upset with: https://fastmail.blog/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic-me...

If you have to do this for business reasons, tell us that, don't try and tell us AMP is good for the world, when we know it isn't.

> Surely the correct solution for mobile developers is to teach people to use restraint in piling on extra crud, not bootstrap some extra crud that prevents them from using any other crud.

Any time you have to rely on lots of disparate people, all potentially under wildly different pressures and facing diverse incentives, to make the same smart choices... you may be facing an uphill battle.

We've tried to rely on exactly what you call for. It's such an obviously, clearly, good idea. Painfully so. We've been trying it for quite a long time by now. It's difficult to call it a success.

Openness, flexibility, and interoperability are great and wonderous things. It's a tragedy, then, that so many use the tools and powers granted them by these virtues so apallingly poorly.

> It's hard to build a great website, particularly one which works well on mobile.

> The need to use AMP-the-framework to get instant loading is hopefully a temporary one partially fixed by signed exchanges.

You know what would really fix this? Developers doing their work. Deeply knowing and understanding the consequences of their work and how everything comes together in the end and leads to a slow website or not.

We don't need to put even more power in the hands of Google, because we (as in "some developers") don't know how to do our job right and therefore punish the internet as a whole.

There is no valid reason for the use of AMP. It's only there because a) developers fucked up and b) Google forces you to use it. If we would fix a), I'm not sure b) would even be a valid point anymore.

> You know what would really fix this? Developers doing their work.

That's merely replacing one problem by another, which is: how do you get developers to do their work?

You'll need people that _really_ love their work. I know that's hard to find or to achieve, but it's possible to have some intrinsic motivation to deliver better and better code each day, to grow with your tasks etc.

I think most people these days are in for the money and not for "the challenge" which is why we see so much mediocre software. On the other hand there is excellent software too, so there are people who really know what they are doing.

> You know what would really fix this? Developers doing their work. Deeply knowing and understanding the consequences of their work and how everything comes together in the end and leads to a slow website or not.

This is a wonderful idea! It's tragic, then, that nobody has thought to try this for the past several decades...

Seems like nobody has, yeah. Otherwise developers would only laugh about things like AMP and we would have great websites. One can only dream this might happen in the future.

I dunno all the amp sites I have visited have had terrible user experience IMO... Also for the longest time AMP had absolutely broken in-page search on mobile safari.

If you believe in a web technology go through the process and champion a draft standard. It can start out as an experimental flag enabled feature or vendor prefixed feature before it is adopted as a web standard. But don't ram this shit down our throats...

Also let's talk about the obvious business incentives for data collection both Google and cloudflare have for serving up AMP pages.

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