AMP loads super, super quickly and is simply a better experience right now. So can we add enough design to make an AMP page feel like The Verge?
What a depressing conclusion! But I guess it’s easier than, y’know, actually fixing the bloated Verge website, packed with megabytes and megabytes of invasive trackers. It’s no wonder people prefer the AMP experience. Yet the idea of improving the website isn’t even raised in this whole article.
Then again, this is the same guy who tried to lay the blame for The Verge’s abysmal performance at the feet of web browsers.
It’s really good to see that Vox are taking measures to fix their atrocious performance problems. The Verge in particular is a case study in how not to serve up text and images on the web. There have been times in the past when I’ve wanted to link to an article there but then thought “I can’t in good conscience put a fellow human through that.”
This is great! The folks at Basecamp are releasing the front-end frameworks they use to build Hey. There’s Turbo—the successor to Turbolinks:
It offers a simpler alternative to the prevailing client-side frameworks which put all the logic in the front-end and confine the server side of your app to being little more than a JSON API.
With Turbo, you let the server deliver HTML directly, which means all the logic for checking permissions, interacting directly with your domain model, and everything else that goes into programming an application can happen more or less exclusively within your favorite programming language. You’re no longer mirroring logic on both sides of a JSON divide. All the logic lives on the server, and the browser deals just with the final HTML.
Yes, this is basically Hijax (which is itself simply a name for progressive enhancement applied to Ajax) and I’m totally fine with that. I don’t care what it’s called when the end result is faster, more resilient websites.
Compare and contrast the simplicity of the Hotwire/Turbo approach to the knots that React is tying itself up in to try to get the same performance benefits.
Reinventing the web the long way around, in a way that gives Google even more control of it. No thanks.
How Robin really feels about Google AMP:
Here’s my hot take on this: fuck the algorithm, fuck the impressions, and fuck the king. I would rather trade those benefits and burn my website to the ground than be under the boot and heel and of some giant, uncaring corporation.
There’s no sugar-coating it—AMP components are dreadfully inaccessible:
We’ve reached a point where AMP may “solve” the web’s performance issues by supercharging the web’s accessibility problem, excluding even more people from accessing the content they deserve.
Verging on the ridiculous.
A small-scale conspiracy theory from the innards of Google.
A new free course on responsive web design.
Speak softly and carry a big Google stick.
“I am not a number, I am a free website!”