AMP HTML anyone?

jensen

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Came across https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/use-AMP-HTML when trying to optimize content for mobile web.

What's the difference between AMP HTML and responsive websites? Thought that by making websites responsive we have made it "mobile friendly" Now there's this AMP HTML.

Things keep changing on the web it's hard to keep up without a knowledgeable group to keep you sane :)

EDIT:
https://www.keycdn.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages/
This is a good introduction to AMP and gives links to google resources.

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/about-amp.html
This is the main project page by google with examples and documentation.

Cheers
 
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essellar

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It's basically a demi-buttocked way of putting insanely slow web pages on some sort of medication so they can pretend to be functioning members of society. Apart from the CDN cache aspect of the thing, it would significantly bloat and slow down any of the sorts of static pages I'd create, and getting the CDN feature means adding quite a bit of unnecessary boilerplate. If you've never seen this talk by Maciej Ceglowski, I think you'll find it more than worth a watch. Google AMP gets a mention along the way.
 

jensen

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Found the tutorial section for AMP HTML - https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create.html

There's so much more code. Don't see how this AMP HTML would take off unless Google makes it a requirement like when they made "mobile-friendly" sites a requirement by a certain date.

Google is going back on their own recommendation -> Don't use separate websites for mobile and desktop, use responsive web design.

BUT now with AMP html it seems like we have to have a desktop version and the AMP version referenced to the desktop version. Back to serving 2 files for one page?
 
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essellar

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Pretty much, yes. There's the AMP-only option, but then you're stuck making sure that every single desktop browser properly ignores the AMP stuff and degrades gracefully. Oh, and you won't be able to use the AMP components if they actually contain page content, so the AMP stuff is already marked as unnecessary if you can make an effective single page and you can safely dispense with it anyway. I'm not saying that it's never worth it; if you have a sufficiently complex application that can carefully be disguised as a static page, then there are probably significant benefits to be had. But if your page is just a page, it really does represent a step backwards in every way except preferred placing on Google mobile search results pages.
 

jensen

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Google has many projects and not all become mainstream.
Hopefully this AMP dies quietly so the web people don't have the extra work to do.
It seems like it's merely having a project to look busy. New standards mean more work and more employment and more sales? :)
 
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