'Why I Decided To Disable AMP On My Site' (alexkras.com) 145
Web developer Alex Kras on Monday listed a number of reasons why he dislikes Google's AMP project, and why he pulled support for it on his website. From his post: Back in the day we used to have WAP pages -- specific web pages that were presented only to mobile devices. Opting into AMP, for publishers, is kind of like going back to those days. Instead of using responsive design (making sure that one version of the site works well on all devices) publishers are forced to maintain two versions of each page -- their regular version for larger devices and mobile phones that don't use Google and the AMP version. The benefit of AMP is that it imposes tough restrictions on content, making it load fast. The issue with this approach is that AMP becomes a subset of the original content. For example, user comments are often removed. I also find the way images load in AMP to be buggy. AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I've seen it fail fairly regularly, leaving the article with an empty white square instead of the image. [...] It's up to publishers to decide if they want to add AMP support on their site. Users, however, don't have an option to turn AMP off. It would be nice if Google provided a user level setting to turn results rendered as AMP off. Unfortunately, even if they were to add this option, it wouldn't help much when Twitter of Facebook would decide to server AMP. Further reading: Kill Google AMP before it KILLS the web - The Register, The Problem With Google AMP, 2 Billion Pages On Web Now Use Google's AMP, Pages Now Load Twice As Fast. John Gruber on open web: Fuck Facebook.
Great, but... (Score:2)
Now if only every other web developer in the world followed suit, and also abandoned the numerous other methods of forcing browsers into crappy "mobile site" ghettos, instead of designing their pages properly, the world would be a better place.
Accommodating fat fingers without excess scrolling (Score:2)
designing their pages properly
Then what's the "proper" way to accommodate the fat fingers of users of touch screen devices without needing excessive scrolling for users with more precise pointing devices? Adding padding around links improves usability on touch screens but increases the scrolling for mouse or trackpad users. And controlling the padding with a CSS media query breakpoint based on viewport width doesn't help because a touch-operated iPad held in landscape orientation has more pixels than a trackpad-operated netbook.
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It's ''ad nauseam'', you fucking peasant.
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The DEVICE knows if it is using a touchscreen or a mouse. It is therefore up to the device to render properly, and the web designer should simply not get in the way of this. I.e. don't think you can force a particular layout so don't even try.
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What if it is a touchscreen device with mouse support, what then?
It goes based on whether a mouse happens to be connected. This can cause documents using the @media (pointer:coarse) media query to change styles when a mouse is connected or disconnected.
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your browser can let you choose.
Did you know, that firefox allows you to use alternative stylesheets in the "view" menu? when a site provides a stylesheet with rel="alternative", you can choose it there. And old mozilla had button navigation for rel="next", rel="previous" links. Browsers had nice features even before html5 ...
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CSS4 media queries anticipate that multiple pointing devices may be connected at once, which is why it defines a concept of "primary pointer" used to evaluate the pointer media property. If the user wants to use the touch screen, he should tell the browser to treat touch as the primary pointer.
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It's unclear to which part of the article you are referring. I searched inside the document "I decided to disable AMP on my site" by Alex Kras [alexkras.com] for the words "touch" and "finger", and neither word was there. I searched for the word "link", and none of the results mentioned adapting link size based on whether the browser uses touch or mouse. Could you quote a sentence from the relevant portion?
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br. Disabling AMP doesnt solve the problem that browsers arent reformatting automatically, nor can a web page developer solve that problem. The browser authors need to step up and stop trying to be the next PDF.
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And controlling the padding with a CSS media query breakpoint based on viewport width doesn't help because a touch-operated iPad held in landscape orientation has more pixels than a trackpad-operated netbook.
@media
Could you be more specific as to which CSS media query expression you refer?
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All iPad models present a 1024x768 viewport in landscape mode, regardless of how many actual pixels there are. If your content is so crammed together that you can't tap a link with a fat finger on a 7" screen, you need to work on your design a bit.
The shittiest Chromebook I can find prese
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All iPad models present a 1024x768 viewport in landscape mode
So did my first couple PCs (an Acer TravelMate laptop and a Dell Dimension desktop), which had a 1024x768 pixel display and a mouse. My netbook (a Dell Inspiron mini 1012) also has a 1024-pixel-wide viewport because its display is 1024x600 pixels, but it has a trackpad. A full-size PC is likely to have a 960-pixel-wide viewport and a mouse when the user "snaps" a browser window to half of a 1920x1080 pixel screen.
The shittiest Chromebook I can find presents a 1280x720 viewport.
According to the site you linked [viewportsizes.com], the Nexus 10 tablet in landscape orientation also presents as
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And if you really can't make it work, consider also using min-width and max-width expressions based on physical size in addition to pixels, so you're measuring physical and virtual capabilities of the device. Even Windows can work accurately with those now.
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@media (pointer:coarse)
Enjoy.
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Neither IE nor Firefox supports pointer:coarse [caniuse.com].
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If your content is so crammed together that you can't tap a link with a fat finger on a 7" screen, you need to work on your design a bit.
Phones will have smaller screens and are dead simple to detect with media queries.
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And if you really can't make it work, consider also using min-width and max-width expressions based on physical size in addition to pixels, so you're measuring physical and virtual capabilities of the device. Even Windows can work accurately with those now.
I'm failing to understand how high DPI implies pointer precision, unless you're recommending targeting specific models of Apple kit. Laptops and Android tablets vary so much in DPI that the high end of tablets, which lack a trackpad, is likely to overlap the low end of laptops, which have a trackpad.
Re: Accommodating fat fingers without excess scrol (Score:2)
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Did you just assume the size of my screen and the size of my pointing device?
Until web browsers support CSS4 media queries, web browsers have to use CSS3 media queries and assume that any device with a viewport narrower than 26em or so has a touch screen, which is a coarse pointer.
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Browsers need to help there. Chrome does a very good job. firefox not that good. But the worst are websites, which disable the zoomin on purpose, because they know better what fontsize is good for me.
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My smartphone has enough resolution and the ability to pan / scan / zoom over all of your content.
Then what's the proper way to serve the majority of users, who prefer to view documents that are already at a reasonable zoom level when they first load? Search engines behave similarly: Google is known to penalize documents that aren't already at a reasonable zoom level when they first load.
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Fine-point styli for touch-operated devices still under warranty, such as the Apple Pencil and Samsung S Pen, aren't widespread among most websites' audiences. And a stylus for capacitive touch screens is nearly as imprecise as the finger it's designed to emulate.
Not just AMP... (Score:3)
The vast majority of websites become crippled when I browse their mobile version, and I am talking about those "responsive designs" (which the summary seems to indicate they are the "good option"), not just AMP. Even on my 5" phone - i.e. a prime target for "mobile web" content - I usually have to switch to the regular website to retain functionality that I consider essential (but the designers apparently do not). I don't mind having to pan & zoom a bit when everything I need is right there on the page - the only difference is that I use landscape mode.
And that includes slashdot...
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That's what AMP is supposed to fix. "Responsive Design" means "Load the whole god damned thing, all 4 gigabytes, all the massive JavaScript, everything; then apply CSS to show it friendly-like on a Mobile Phone so it doesn't look like shit." AMP provides an alternate location, so your cell phone downloads only half a megabyte of crap, and starts downloading the 15MB of images as you scroll the page. It can also supply cut-back JavaScript and skip loading scripting blocks for high-intensity features that
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If the CSS loads all the desktop-version images, it's badly coded and/or the browser doesn't use the CSS properly.
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If the CSS loads all the desktop-version images, it's badly coded and/or the browser doesn't use the CSS properly.
What's the proper way using HTML and CSS to specify a separate image for desktop or mobile? Internet Explorer fails to support the srcset property of the img element at all, and srcset in Edge has severe distortion issues [microsoft.com].
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I read the W3C spec page for CSS3 media queries [w3.org]. But I couldn't find a media feature for "an input device more precise than a finger-operated touch screen is in use" or "the device has a physical keyboard" or "the connection is metered". Can any web dev point me in the right direction for these features?
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None of those matter to a sane person. When I browse on my phone, I just zoom in if a link is too hard to tap. The presence of a keyboard should be irrelevant. And if I want to load a page on a metered connection, that's my problem, not the server's or the web designer's.
Technical knowledge varies by audience (Score:2)
When I browse on my phone, I just zoom in if a link is too hard to tap.
You are also aware of the zoom feature. Not all sites' audiences are as technical as that of Slashdot. In addition, the mobile view of Google Search penalizes sites that initially load with text too small or links too close together.
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The presence of a keyboard should be irrelevant.
How is a keyboard irrelevant? I find a keyboard relevant for two reasons.
A site might use the presence of a keyboard as a (weak) proxy for the presence of a mouse. I admit that this is weak because a phone may be used with a Bluetooth keyboard but no Bluetooth mouse or trackpad.
I find it tedious to enter HTML, such as the <strong>, <em>, <a href="...">, and <code> elements commonly used in Slashdot comments, without a physical keyboard because the required punctuation is scattered ac
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I couldn't find a media feature for "an input device more precise than a finger-operated touch screen is in use"
This feature will be available in CSS4: Pointing Device Quality: the pointer feature [csswg.org].
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Images aren't all specified in CSS. There's this <img/> tag ...
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The img tag has this srcset parameter, you see...
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Kind of. Some sites have a lot of images to load and can either have image tags or can use JavaScript to do fancy things to set the images. Much JS is poorly-coded, so yes, it eats your desktop as well as your mobile device. Likewise, a lot of JS that shouldn't load on mobile ... does, and doesn't end its timers and such, so it keeps running.
AMP mainly tries to restrict what you can do. It says, "On a mobile device, you can't do certain resource-heavy things anymore," so you're forced to at least fal
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It's more likely that the next release of emacs will be written in systemd lisp.
motherfuckingwebsite (Score:2, Interesting)
motherfuckingwebsite.com [motherfuckingwebsite.com]
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Seven CSS declarations improve its readability [bettermoth...ebsite.com].
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When lines of text are nearly 1920 pixels long, how do you avoid rereading a line or skipping a line?
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Reducing font size on page as wide as a 1080p display would just cause the automatic word wrapping to cram more text onto each line, making the problem even worse. This is why newspapers have multiple columns per page and why the "Better MF Website" sets a maximum width for the body text column.
Useful max-width by default (Score:2)
if I did have that problem and thought it due to lines being too long, I could just resize the browser window and the text will wrap.
A max-width on the body text column does pretty much the same thing. Putting max-width in the CSS rather than waiting for the user to "resize the browser window" does the right thing by default for the majority of people, who do have this problem.
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"Responsive websites shall not remove functionality." - The laws of the Internet, written by me. Also probably some smarter people.
Honestly, you're describing a terrible website. It's not a site that provides a fair or reasonable example of responsive web design as a comparison. Just because someone calls a car an egg, doesn't make it an egg.
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Again (Score:3)
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Re:Again (Score:4, Insightful)
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Request Desktop Site Version? (Score:1)
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Yeah, except for those stupid sites that detect the mobile browser regardless of what UA is reported by this feature and force you to use the mobile version no matter what. Fuck those sites.
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There's this litle Desktop Mode Add-on (Firefox, of course) which make all the sites behave.
I like desktop even on my phone (Score:3)
so what if it doesn't compact to remove 1/2 of the info I want to read. Pinch and zoom bitches ...
John Gruber on open web: Fuck Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
And in the same way they block indexing by search engines, Facebook forbids The Internet Archive from saving copies of posts.
That's not bad thing though; nothing of value is lost and the storage space could be used for more valuable stuff.
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That's not bad thing though; nothing of value is lost and the storage space could be used for more valuable stuff.
At no time in human history have so many shared so much. This data will one day be of immense interest to historians.
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This data will one day be of immense interest to historians.
Many things are of immense interest to historians; nevertheless, there's never a guarantee that a document for X exists for any random X you might be interested in. Digital dark age may always strike.
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thats what was thought about time capsules
The problem is only leaving them for a hundred years. Only Americans think that's a long time.
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The linked article is talking about something that the author thinks is valuable, and if you read it, you might agree (the story about Roger Moore).
People's history have value, most of us see that and the Internet Archive creators and maintainers certainly see that way too. It's pretty arrogant to say that people's posts are less valuable than some storage space. And contrary to the direction the world is moving too.
If people where like you the Internet Archive would probably not exist, only Wikipedia. Reme
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AMP Breaks Functionality (Score:3)
My biggest gripe with AMP is that it breaks same-page-searching. If you have a specific phrase you're searching for on a very long article, it just doesn't work well because all the search results still seem to be rendered underneath the article, and same-page searching seems to go through each of those first, and sometimes still can't find text after that on the AMP page. When I'm looking something up on mobile, I often just want to find a something quick, not read an entire article.
fritter kitten fumble grope (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't whether AMP is responsible, but I visited a site about a week ago with progressive content and image load as I paged down. This is annoying, but nothing new.
Since I wanted to CTRL-F to search within the page, I spent 5 s manually pressing PG-DOWN to fully load the page.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that most of the top of the page—previously loaded already—had now disappeared from my document, and was doing progressive load on the way back up.
That wasn't just irritating. That was outright /etc/hosts-level hellban territory.
Please, for the love of God, look upon my 16 DIMM slots ye Mighty frugal HTTP server, and load the whole damn document all at once, SVP.
Beefy PC with pay-per-bit upstream (Score:2)
Please, for the love of God, look upon my 16 DIMM slots ye Mighty frugal HTTP server, and load the whole damn document all at once, SVP.
Even a PC with double digit GB of RAM can be connected to a satellite or cellular upstream connection whose ISP charges $5 to $10 per GB. Though a non-AMP page like this [pineight.com] still loads fast because it's so simple, I imagine people aren't going to be happy to pay the ISP to load images that won't be viewed.
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I can agree with the goal of limiting download bandwidth to just what the user has viewed.
However dynamically UNloading that content after it has scrolled past, such that it must be downloaded AGAIN if the user scrolls back up strikes me as counter productive to the goal of minimizing bandwidth consumption.
There is no justification for not loading all of the html (such that it can be searched) at the start however.
AMP is not the problem, you are the problem (Score:2)
The point of AMP is to restrict what you can do so that pages load faster. And as a side effect, Google gets to make the rules.
But AMP would never have existed if webmasters were a bit more reasonable. We are talking about sites weighting several megabytes for the equivalent of a single blog post, with scripts creatively breaking browsers. With a 2.3MB / 66 object webpage, the author is definitively guilty of this.
How about, instead of complaining about AMP, take the core of the technology, which is actuall
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We are talking about sites weighting several megabytes for the equivalent of a single blog post, with scripts creatively breaking browsers. With a 2.3MB / 66 object webpage, the author is definitively guilty of this.
Is 2.3 MB for a whole month's worth of blog posts, including several photos and/or CGI renderings, likewise too heavy? If so, what change would you recommend for a page like this one [pineight.com]?
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Is 2.3 MB for a whole month's worth of blog posts, including several photos and/or CGI renderings, likewise too heavy? If so, what change would you recommend for a page like this one [pineight.com]?
I wouldn't change anything. This is 2.3 MB worth of content, not 2.3 MB worth of scripts, fonts, stylesheets, oversized pictures, etc...
I don't have a problem with large pages, I have a problem with low content/size ratio.
Re: AMP is not the problem, you are the problem (Score:2)
The first time I can across an amp page I wondered what the hell was wrong - I got no comments and searching didn't work - so I tried to disable it, only to find out I want allowed to.
That's the problem, many apps insist on linking to amp content only even though I want the full fat version. It shows that Google realised this was a problem, seeing as they added a link option to Chrome on Android, rather than forcing us to jump through multiple hoops to view the actual content
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Yes, that's the point... for Google. Like any private company, everything Google does serve their bottom line.
But the reason Google did this and not something else is that there really is a need for faster browsing and AMP is their way of addressing it for profit.
But if webpages were the same size they were 10 years ago, everything would be crazy fast now and there would be no need for AMP.
And ads aren't the problem. There were ads and analytics 10 years ago, but while they were just as annoying as they are
If you feel like linking to DF... (Score:4, Insightful)
... Gruber has written specifically about AMP. https://daringfireball.net/lin... [daringfireball.net]
If you are a publisher and your web pages don't load fast, the sane solution is to fix your fucking website so that pages load fast, not to throw your hands up in the air and implement AMP.
He has written more about it in the past -- links are in that piece.
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Will Google increase your PageRank by the same amount as implementing AMP?
Comment removed (Score:3)
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"AMP is for ARTICLES, not SITES."
ARTICLES ARE FOR MAGAZINES, NOT WEB SITES.
But I guess you failed to understand that since you've probably never picked up a piece of dead wood in your life.
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Or as Gruber said before... you could just "fix your fucking web site".
The only people that AMP benefits, is Google. It's a lock-in tool, plain and simple.
Why I decided never to implement AMP (Score:2)
Mandatory Javascript (mandatory loaded from google cdn) for a restricted subset of HTML?
W.T.F.
1) Define a Subset of HTML
2) Create a Parser
3) Validate the page. When it's AMP display it with your fast parser, if not open a browser
4) ???
5) PROFIT
Why does it need javascript?! Javascript should be FORBIDDEN on "fast" pages.
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The thing is: AMP should make it the standard.
A subset of html, a subset of javascript. Possibly some instruction counting (like "total js is no bigger than 4k" but not on filesize (which would just get more minimization) but on instructions and complexity).
You can open you menu with javascript, if you really don't know how to do it otherwise. But you cannot load a external script, which loads an external script, which loads an tag, which loads an ad ...
Cry All You Like (Score:1)
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Without advertisements, how should a site's operator pay its writers, its server operators, and its bandwidth bill? Paywalls don't work for sites that rely on traffic from search engines [blockadblock.com]. What's the third way, besides ads and paywalls, to fund a site that is larger in scope than a hobby?
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A good question to ask, if you're generating content, is that if the only way to pay for it is by embedding advertising, then the content is worth nothing. Thus, if you do want to broadcast it to the world for some reason, hobby or otherwise, you're going to have to find the money yourself. If the advertising industry disappeared overnight, and all the content that it funded did so too, nothing of value would be lost.
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Host ads and scripts on YOUR servers (or rented space). It is the connections outside your domain that cause lag that is beyond your control.
Practical problems with not using an ad broker (Score:2)
In theory, I'm inclined to agree that hosting the ads on the publisher's server is probably the most efficient for network data volume, CPU time, and user privacy. But in practice, a publisher selling ad space directly to advertisers faces a few additional difficulties compared to the more common route of going through a broker, such as an ad network or an ad exchange.
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Have you found a broker that will prevent malware in ads?
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Have you found a broker that will prevent malware in ads?
No. But despite the answer to your question being no, a broker still outscores no broker.
A broker has 3 points: a larger selection of advertisers willing to pay competitive prices for your inventory, a reputation for fighting click fraud, and tax collection and remittance in multiple jurisdictions.
No broker has 2 points: not a malware vector because no third-party scripts execute on the client, and the viewer's browsing habits are shared with fewer third parties. (I say "fewer" rather than "no" because the