What AMP (Maybe) Means for News Developers - Features - Source: An OpenNews project

January 5th, 2017

So if AMP is useful it’s because it raises the stakes. If we (news developers) don’t figure out faster ways to load our pages for readers, then we’re going to lose a lot of magic.

A number of developers answered questions on the potential effects of Google’s AMP project. This answer resonates a lot with my own feelings:

AMP is basically web performance best practices dressed up as a file format. That’s a very clever solution to what is, at heart, a cultural problem: when management (in one form or another) comes to the CMS team at a news organization and asks to add more junk to the site, saying “we can’t do that because AMP” is a much more powerful argument than trying to explain why a pop-over “Like us on Facebook!” modal is driving our readers to drink.

But the danger is that AMP turns into a long-term “solution” instead of a stop-gap:

So in a sense, the best possible outcome is that AMP is disruptive enough to shake the boardroom into understanding the importance of performance in platform decisions (and making the hard business decisions this demands), but that developers are allowed to implement those decisions in standard HTML instead of adding yet another delivery format to their export pipeline.

The ideal situation looks a lot more like Tim’s proposal:

I would be much more pleased with AMP if it was a spec for Google’s best-practice recommendations rather than effectively a new non-standard format. By using standard HTML/CSS/JS as the building blocks, they’re starting on the right foot, but the reliance on a Google-decreed AMP JavaScript library, use of separate AMP-specific URLs, and encouragement to use a Google-provided CDN are all worrying aspects.