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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 23 2019, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the amp-it-up dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Google unplugs AMP, hooks it into OpenJS Foundation after critics turn up the volume

AMP – which originally stood for Accelerated Mobile Pages though not any more – was launched in 2015, ostensibly to speed up page loading on smartphones. The technology includes AMP HTML, which is a set of performance-optimized web components, and the AMP Cache, which serves validated AMP pages. Most AMP pages are served by Google's AMP Cache.

AMP looks somewhat like a Google land grab and has been controversial. While better performance is welcome, having to support AMP HTML is also a burden on publishers and a constraint on web design, especially since Google's guidelines state that "users must be able to experience the same content and complete the same actions on AMP pages as on the corresponding canonical pages, where possible." Supporting AMP is optional, though if Google search prioritizes AMP pages, publishers have little choice.

In September 2018, the AMP project announced an "open governance model" where decisions are made by a steering committee and a "wider variety of voices" have a say in the project's direction. The announcement included "exploring moving AMP to a foundation."

That move will now take place. Google principal engineer Malte Ubl, a co-founder of the AMP project, announced last week that "AMP is joining the OpenJS Foundation incubation program." This means that the project will join the foundation once a number of onboarding tasks have been completed. Ubl adds that Google will continue to finance the project, via the foundation, and that "the team of Google employees contributing full time to the AMP open source project will also continue to do so."

In the FAQ here the move is stated to be a response to "communities concerns around [the project's] ties to Google as well as concerns around scaling the project."


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:01PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:01PM (#910936)

    ...and I wouldn't miss it one bit. If your website uses AMP, I leave because it is fundamentally broken. Want your page to load faster? Stop loading it up with obnoxious ads, horrendous JS, 5 different frameworks, and 8 different tracking systems.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:13PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:13PM (#910948) Journal

    And next you'll tell I shouldn't make an HTTP GET URL a thin wrapper around a JSON request for the actual content. Or worse that the URL should actually represent the content you're looking at!

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by BsAtHome on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:21PM (1 child)

      by BsAtHome (889) on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:21PM (#910951)

      But that would be a disaster. Information that can be retrieved in one step and rendered immediately? That is a mistake.
      /s

      I miss the web 0.99 (not the blink-tag, though).

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @07:58PM (#910970)

        ...functionality if it was intended to benefit people other than advertisers and content restrictors.

        But the point at which it was utilitarian rather than baroque was back when websockets were still in beta and marketing and management hadn't wrapped their heads around it yet. Everything since has just been more dumpsterfire poured atop the other messes.