> AMP does not seem like a walled garden tech. any crawler can find and use the AMP version of a page through this tag
So "any crawler" who is willing to slavishly follow whatever Google is currently doing, and currently doing in the open (who knows how long that will last), can technically get access to the same content so it's not a "walled garden".
To me it sounds like Google doing yet another non-standard thing without asking the rest of the web-community for input, and using their weight as a way to push this through in their usual, hostile manner.
And here on HN people are defending it as perfectly reasonable. The mob clearly has something to learn from these guys.
So lets say AMP was not invented. Web pages have been notoriously slow on mobile for a decade. Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster? where is W3 or Mozilla? Its been a decade. if there was a competituve open standard I would be against AMP but there isnt.
> Where is this open standard to make pages lod faster?
Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start.
The web isn't slow. People deliberately create slow web-pages because they care more about user-tracking and "fancy" technology than they care about user-experience.
And making Google a pre-requisite for any web-page is NOT the solution to that problem. That's the wrong way around. We need less tracking. Less JS. Less Google.
At some point... god, most of a decade ago now, I guess, it seems like the kinds of people doing web design changed and this new crop didn't care about or understand bandwidth constraints like the old ones did. Strangely, this was around the same time "digital native" instead of "print influenced" design got big, so you'd think it'd have gone the other way, but it definitely did not.
In fact, I'd say the much-derided Flash aesthetic/inefficiency kind of won, right around the time we were all celebrating killing Flash. Everything's whiz-bang shiny and so damn slow and resource-hogging. Plus flat design is a disaster in all but the most capable hands, so I'd say UX generally has suffered over the last decade.
> At some point... god, most of a decade ago now, I guess, it seems like the kinds of people doing web design changed and this new crop didn't care about or understand bandwidth constraints like the old ones did.
This is a cyclical problem because people tend not to measure performance until they notice a problem, which means it's a function of both technical factors and user expectations. The rise of mobile added a confusion point since it basically dropped back to dial-up/DSL-class networking after the overall web community had had a decade to get used to cable modem-grade performance and made wasting bandwidth a direct cost rather than just inefficiency. In the mid-2000s, using a big JavaScript toolkit wasn't great but it wasn't so bad when you could assume that most users had better latency than even LTE delivers and user expectations hadn't adjusted for the post-IE era.
The other big factor is the ongoing decline of advertising as a viable business model. The worst offenders I see are either ads or the measurement tools publishers use to document their site's performance, and that's been getting continually worse as everyone keeps chasing diminishing returns.
> Not filling a page of what is effectively 80KB static text-content with 20MBs of JS, fonts, tracking-code and other "assets" would be a good start.
I imagine if you expand and codify this idea, you will come up with something very close to AMP. I'm not sure if you're against the idea of AMP/AMP-like standard, or against Google's execution of it.
So "any crawler" who is willing to slavishly follow whatever Google is currently doing, and currently doing in the open (who knows how long that will last), can technically get access to the same content so it's not a "walled garden".
To me it sounds like Google doing yet another non-standard thing without asking the rest of the web-community for input, and using their weight as a way to push this through in their usual, hostile manner.
And here on HN people are defending it as perfectly reasonable. The mob clearly has something to learn from these guys.