Google is going to get in trouble stewarding their gateway into the internet in this fashion with these rules. Rules about slow page load times can be seen as universal. Rules about using a Google proxy however are just begging for political intervention. As someone with a small business, I'm upset that these companies, under the guise of helping users, are giving reasons for these liberal governments to act. It negatively affects me when these inevitable regulations come down because companies like Google can't remain provider-neutral. Arg!
> We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.
I concur here and have been thinking about this recently especially in the context of web browsing in the terminal. But it has to be driven by user adoption, not rules written on the walls of a few companies' gardens.
In the meantime, I would ask that the search engine not give preference to their proxy over anyone else's but instead define the guidelines that we can all reasonably meet.
From what I am aware, in practice there are a large number of sites which provide different content or different behavior in response to the GoogleBot user-agent.
Pinterest runs its own AMP cache for prerendering pages linked from Twitter. Bing runs its own AMP cache to prerender pages linked from Bing. Yandex runs its own AMP cache to prerender pages linked from Yandex. They can't use each others' AMP caches and get the same benefits.
Honest question: would the author of the linked article have experienced the same issues if the users had actually visited his own site's AMPages?
Or, based on the browser I use when I care about speed, can we design pages around the constraints of Lynx/Links/eLinks? The CSS layouts work when called for, menus work in text-mode, but without images, *.js, and all the other Web annoyances, everything loads quick even on the worst connections.
If I were looking for song lyrics, or a recipe, or schedule information, etc, I would be browsing in HTML Lite mode. I don't want popovers, subscribe now boxes, animated bullshit, etc.
My root post is sitting in the negatives right now, and I own that and embrace it because it is how discussions about AMP always go on HN. A bunch of web developers herd in to tell us how terrible AMP is while the web gets more and more bloated, more and more destructive and tragedy of the commons, and we all layer on various shoehorned, half-assed solutions to fight back (e.g. Ad blockers, nuisance blockers, tracking blockers, etc).
Really, what you're saying you want just links back to what I suggested - disable remote CSS (preferably also inline but that's a pipe-dream), disable JavaScript, disable images, and turn your content blocker on full blast. Either that or just use Links. It works for me and blocks all the crud so I can get the content I actually want. The only thing I'd like to do with Links is to change the terminal colors it uses (which I don't think I can do in Windows - if you know how please do tell me). HTML was a fine language for what it does, and it still serves as a very solid core for a Web made of pure content. Only a Web made up of utter corporate nonsense needs scripting.
In abstract, I also don't like the notion of giving Google that much power. Even if what you say makes sense, and regulation is necessary, a private company doing it is the worst of both worlds - they are not accountable to the rest of us, and they have their own goals that contradict the public good.
Couldn't agree more with this. People approximate it with e.g. noscript, it would be awesome to have a standard which describes a minimal HTML Lite spec though.
Edit: It would be awesome as another option in the link context menu: open in new tab, open in incognito tab, open in lite tab
Right now the AMP CDN enforces the restrictions of AMP (you can't simply pretend it conforms to AMP to Google and then feed the client something else) which is something that is fundamentally misunderstood when this is discussed on HN. AMP is a protection and guarantee of behavior for the user, it is not for the publisher, it is not for the developer. Google has a profound vested interest in trying to maintain people's interest in the web, especially in the face of various alternative walled gardens like Facebook feeds, Apple News, etc.
To me, AMP is just Google trying to turn the open web in its own walled garden.
Yes, right now there is a technical need for an intermediary because it guarantees AMP is actually AMP. It is trivial for a page to say it's AMP, load the AMP standard library, and then do everything disallowed by AMP. There is absolutely nothing preventing that but that intermediary rejecting non-compliant content.
Now of course we've talked about an HTML Light and that would be the browser enforcing that limited sandbox. It could send a relevant cookie and then reject content that steps outside the bounds. But we don't have that right now.
That's because the standard is not well defined. If you had a doctype just for AMP at the top, that would work. I don't see any technical reason why google's servers are necessary. I see a business reason for Google of course but there's nothing technically that makes sense.
> Now of course we've talked about an HTML Light and that would be the browser enforcing that limited sandbox. It could send a relevant cookie and then reject content that steps outside the bounds. But we don't have that right now.
Well, AMP could be just that if it was standardized.
Then "HTML Fat" and "HTML Light" could even be served as one document. If you execute the Javascript, you get the fat version. Else, you get the light version.
If you use Javascript not just to improve the behaviour but also to display content at all, you can provide fallback content that is only displayed in light mode. The fallback content is marked by a special tag. Let's call it `noscript`.
My point is: Making it easier to serve sane and lightweight HTML will not help fix the problem. Publishers don't want to do that, they like all that crap. If we want them to make sane web pages, we must force them.
AMP is offered as a promise to the user, not the publisher. When I see AMP it guarantees that the site has minimally invasive JavaScript (and the scourge of nonsense that comes with many sites now), will load quickly, etc. The site cannot suddenly bait and switch and start mining bitcoin or spamming pop-overs because it has been technically restricted from doing so.
So yes, sites can be every bit as fast as AMP. And industrial manufacturers can be every bit as clean as required by regulators if they had no regulation. But they aren't, and they don't.
We need an HTML Lite as a mode in the browser that winnows down the enormous featureset of HTML. Not for all content, but for that content where text is king.