Google is Giving up Some Control of the AMP Format (theverge.com) 61
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, has been a controversial project since its debut. Critics say AMP is a Google-specific project and it is creating a walled-garden, which would only serve Google's best interests. On its part, Google has insisted that AMP's mission is to benefit the open web, and that many who contribute to AMP are non-Googlers. On Tuesday, Google announced that it would be giving up some control of how the code behind AMP is managed. A report adds: It plans to move the AMP Project to a "new governance model," which is to say that decisions about the code will be made by a committee that includes non-Googlers. Until now, final decisions about AMP's code have been made by Malte Ubl, the tech lead for the AMP Project at Google. A model with a single person in charge is not actually all that rare in open source. That person is often cheekily referred to as the BDFL, or "benevolent dictator for life." Ubl's been that person for AMP, but, he writes, "we've found that it doesn't scale to the size of the AMP Project today. Instead, we want to move to a model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users."
[...] Google has already signed up non-Google people for the Advisory Committee, which will include representatives from The Washington Post, AliExpress, eBay, Cloudflare, and Automattic (which makes WordPress). Ubl says that it will also include "advocates for an open web," including "Leonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google / Chrome, and Terence Eden." Of course, as anybody who's taken part in a committee knows, it's neither a fun solution nor a guarantee that a single company or person won't dominate it. But it's a step in the right direction, and Google is encouraging people to comment on the plan at the AMP Contributor Summit on September 25th.
[...] Google has already signed up non-Google people for the Advisory Committee, which will include representatives from The Washington Post, AliExpress, eBay, Cloudflare, and Automattic (which makes WordPress). Ubl says that it will also include "advocates for an open web," including "Leonie Watson of The Paciello Group, Nicole Sullivan of Google / Chrome, and Terence Eden." Of course, as anybody who's taken part in a committee knows, it's neither a fun solution nor a guarantee that a single company or person won't dominate it. But it's a step in the right direction, and Google is encouraging people to comment on the plan at the AMP Contributor Summit on September 25th.
Quick question (Score:4, Insightful)
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I would've gotten your package there in a straight line without going backwards.
Now not wandering for a bit sideways is not covered.
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If Google cared the slightest about ad junk, it would rank pages according to speed, at which point 99% of adware would be removed overnight.
AMP allows Google to track every page load, lets Google decide which standards are allowed or not, and breaks the URL paradigm (no wonder Google wants to remove URL display from browsers).
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You could probably think of it as a caching proxy setup. If your data meets certain requirements, they will handle bandwidth for free. But at the expense of losing your identity and making it very hard to know what web site you are actually on. Theoretically, every search engine could use AMP-formatted sites the same way.
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yes. amp is entirely served by google, under the guise of their servers and infrastructure are better than everybody elses.
you're supposed to just ignore the fact that google gets all the juicy metrics on every page view when they do that... which is what the goal of the project really is.
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+1
Including a few "non-Googlers" (what a ridiculous term) on some "advisory" committee is NOT going to fix what is wrong with this whole AMP concept.
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AMP is hosted by you on your web server. You take your existing pages and run them through the AMP library and it outputs AMP .html pages.
There are new <amp> tags mirroring the same syntax as normal tags but indicate mobile optimized content.
So your site has <img src='moo.png'> and the amp page has <amp-img src='moo2.png'>
indicating an optimized for mobile image file.
In your real page you add a <link rel='index-amp.html'> thing to point to the amp version of the page.
Though it sound
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none of that fixes what is ultimately wrong with AMP.
If i cant host the js files on my own server then there is a problem with the standard. FULL STOP.
Regardless of who caches the page or where ever it is hosted the fact remains that google has spoiled the AMP project by mandating that everyone call a script that is hosted from their servers. This leads to many issues the top one of them being: what happens if google abandons this project?
The question was "where are the pages hosted", which is what I answered with.
Of course none of that is about the other problems, I'm not sure why you'd think it would be.
But you are still conflating two separate use cases.
You don't *have* to link their javascript file at all to USE amp.
You have to host it for them to CACHE your amp pages.
If they abandon caching, you wouldn't need or want the js file in the first place.
You are making a complaint along the lines that your web browser or email client has no of
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AMP isn't hosted by Google.
AMP consists of two main parts. There is an AMP Javascript library which is spyware free (you can check for yourself, just download it) and there are AMP caches. Anyone can run an AMP cache. Cloudflare does, I'm sure there are others.
Never use a Google Project unles (Score:4, Insightful)
There are outside contributors big enough to maintain it when google decides to drop it.
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They already cried wolf, saying Android would be open source. Well, that pipe dream got shot down pretty much right out of the gate.
Fuck you Google. Never again. Microsoft spent decades pulling this shit; why would we fall for it from you?
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Because there now is a new generation who didn't experience the horrible ways of MS is the 90s and 00s.
Trust is lost in seconds (Score:2)
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They have something better. User lock in
Its why Windows is on almost all PCs and why there will only ever be two phone OSes at this point.
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...User lock in
Yes. My point exactly. I cannot trust google to develop AMP for my benefit, they are developing it for their benefit and exploitation.
I dont like it cuz it doesn't work (Score:4, Informative)
My biggest conplaint with AMP is that it doesn't work. For example, I dearch and get a hit on resdit and click on the result. I get an amp page that looks like reddit, but I am not logged-in, and images don't work, and the link to see the users other posts isn't a link, it is just text. Sometimes I get a special AMP header with an icon that takes me to the actual page. Other times I have to hand edit the URL to dind the actual page. Basically, Google search results are broken for some sites. I think they should be concerned about that!
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It's hard to take AMP seriously when the specs demand emoji in the HTML tags. But Reddit probably didn't make the links open in a new page/tab, so Google didn't activate them. Anchor tags are supported otherwise, so this is probably either bad documentation of the standard or lazy testing.
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Basically, Google search results are broken for some sites. I think they should be concerned about that!
Lately Google has been less and less interested about the quality of their search results. At one time, that was their #1 concern, but it must be that some key people have retired. They keep using their power as a monopoly to push reform in.....the world. To give two examples, AMP can affect how high your site is ranked in results, and https can affect how high your site is ranked.
Now, you might say that pushing everyone to use https is a "good" thing, and maybe it is, but the change of focus to things be
Re: I dont like it cuz it doesn't work (Score:2)
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I agree. Fuck you Google; you did this with Android, and we know better now.
Google HTML? (Score:2)
It doesn't seem to have anything extra over it.
Re:Google HTML? (Score:5, Informative)
It's worse than that. From the amp spec:
AMP HTML documents MUST:
contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag.
Literally every single amp request must force the client to load and run javascript from a Google controlled domain.
Re:Google HTML? (Score:4, Informative)
That's 80kb of minified javascript. To hell with that.
And it's worse even than that. Go to an amp page, and look at what that javascript contains.
this.preconnect.url("https://facebook.com", a);
Similar stuff for instagram, and twitter, and youtube, and vimeo. And take a look at some of the un-minified code for their advertising component of AMP.
ads/_config.js [githubusercontent.com]
No. Thank. You.
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It's mostly a Google approved HTML page only using a Google-approved list of JS libraries. This allows Google to cache the HTML page, and serve it themselves. You know, preventing their search results from even needing to hit your server to monetize your work (there is an "ads" JS library).
Because the JS is so well defined, they can just catalog the HTML/CSS/Images. Why is that better than caching the JS as well?? By knowing all that the JS can do, they don't have to run it to determine what other conte
is it a first step... (Score:2)
Doesnâ(TM)t matter who controls AMP... (Score:2)
... itâ(TM)s still AMP and itâ(TM)s still shit.
Google search popping up AMP pages convinced me to ditch Google search and switch to DuckDuckGo.
Recently Iâ(TM)ve noticed website links in the Google maps app using a pop-up window with AMP content (and thus broken web browser functionality). AMP annoys me more than the shitness of Apple maps annoys me. It looks like Google is trying to convince me to ditch their maps product now and use Apple maps. What a result Google, well done!
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Google search popping up AMP pages convinced me to ditch Google search and switch to DuckDuckGo.
You should probably be aware then that DuckDuckGo redirects you to AMP pages in their search results too.
It's far easier to see by doing a search and switching to the "news" tab, since every news site seems to host AMP pages.
Just hover over any link and you'll see like 90% go to AMP versions of the news site.
Bing and Yahoo both also serve AMP pages in their search results.
You aren't going to be able to avoid websites AMP versions just by changing search engines, they all do it now.
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How is it possible to avoid AMP sites entirely? Genuine question.
The same way you avoid any other content you don't want, like PDFs.
If you hover over a link that leads you to a PDF or AMP page, don't click it.
Or avoid websites hosting content you don't want.
It's the only way to really be sure.
I thought by use of ublock etc I was doing a reasonable job of staying out of googles data capture silo, but now I'm not so sure
AMP pages can contain anything HTML pages do, so the same tools and methods will work on both.
ublock will continue to block ads, at least as well as usual, linked to from either type of page.
But Google tracks not just by ads so you'll want to continue using whatever you use now to b
Hovering not enough; 8 second delay (Score:2)
If you hover over a link that leads you to a PDF or AMP page, don't click it.
Hovering shows the URL. The URL does not imply a document's media type (PDF vs. HTML), and it certainly does not imply what subset of HTML is used. Technically, AMP is a subset of HTML5.
Or avoid websites hosting content you don't want.
This becomes difficult when the majority of the results on the first page are on an unwanted domain or in an unwanted format.
Unless you mean "in general", in which case an ad blocker, java script whitelist addon, and due diligence is the best we really have.
All AMP pages contain boilerplate that adds an anti-FOUC delay, which times out after 8 seconds if AMP's JavaScript engine fails to load. A JavaScript whitelist add-on would just cause this delay to ru
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Hovering shows the URL. The URL does not imply a document's media type (PDF vs. HTML), and it certainly does not imply what subset of HTML is used. Technically, AMP is a subset of HTML5.
You have that backwards. Imply is all the URL can possibly do, and it most certainly does do that in many cases. What it can't do is guarantee anything.
This becomes difficult when the majority of the results on the first page are on an unwanted domain or in an unwanted format.
Well as the topic at hand was DuckDuckGo, let's use the first few results on the first page, as zero of them are to any domain but what the result implies.
If you'd like to play along at home, go there, search for a common term that the news outlets always have results for, and hit the news tab.
I'll also remove the http so slashdot doesn't linkify them.
I us
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Really? (Score:2)
Ubl's been that person for AMP, but, he writes, "we've found that it doesn't scale to the size of the AMP Project today."
Yeah.. tell that to the Linux Kernel Developers Mailing List....
Sounds like a bad idea (Score:2)
That person is often cheekily referred to as the BDFL, or "benevolent dictator for life." Ubl's been that person for AMP, but, he writes, "we've found that it doesn't scale to the size of the AMP Project today. Instead, we want to move to a model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users."
"Plus, you know, that 'For Life' thing painting a bullseye on my back."
The "Open Web" is better off without AMP. (Score:2)
AMP is the bane of web browsing (Score:2)
Thanks to AMP pages, when I need to visit a news site, first I need to click on the link, and second I need to click on "more info" above and then click on the full URL. When I need to go back, I need to click on the back button twice. That's five clicks to visit a web page, and then return back to the search engine results. How is this an improvement?
I refuse to look at plain AMP pages because they don't render the original faithfully (links to forums are missing, etc). AMP also makes a pain to search thro
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It sounds like you're using Google as your search engine.Just, don't do that. Google points at their cache for AMP pages.