It’s hard not to think of Google as ‘the internet’ since it’s most people’s home page, but I sincerely hope that this incredible tool for humanity doesn’t become a small selection of corporate enclaves. Apps are already ruining the decentralised nature and liberation of the web. The best thing we can do is not adopt it. Otherwise, doing so would mean short term gain for long term pain.

But if we don’t, does this mean we’re all going to end up in the Dark Web with the drugs and terrorists? I mean, it’s just a small mobile-positive change that they’re implementing to, y’know, fork HTML, rail-road non-Google income, minimise affiliations and take ownership of most of the internet’s traffic. Yeah, I know, that’s a cynical way of putting it, but it’s hard not to imagine that non-adopters are going to be marginalised. Google’s way or the dark way. o_O

Who knows? Google can’t be evil, right? It’s their motto!

At WompMobile, we focus on helping our clients deliver fast, user-friendly mobile experiences. And we think AMP is important to that mission.

https://www.google.com/webhp?esrch=AcceleratedMobilePages::Preview,AcceleratedMobilePagesDesktop::Promo

6 script files load with this page – Javascript, and CSS. One of the files has 18,000 lines of CSS. 2 others have 9000 and 7000. That’s 34,000 lines of CSS for a text input box, a “rubics cube”, and an account avatar button. Are they looking in the right place to speed page loading?

More generally, given the competition, and the speed with which they can make improvements to their own platforms, that seems like the most open “Webby” way I can imagine to quickly improve slow mobile loading times. (Google’s interests don’t align perfectly with any given publisher’s, sure, but neither do internet standards bodies’, or JS frameworks’.)

The approach here is consistent with Google’s grand vision of extending the web by wrapping messy complexity into (e.g. all your beloved JavaScript) into custom elements that are easy to reuse. The effort required to make all these new fancy elements may initially favor larger organizations, but Google is insisting that they be part of a shared platform. So just as before, if you want to make something complicated and distinctive, you can, and you can make it as fast as you can. And Google may penalize you for being slow, but that’s not new, and overall it’s probably good that they do.

Similarly, capturing user data once and passing it along to whatever existing analytics tools an organization may prefer seems like a pretty reasonable compromise of openness vs. effectiveness when you compare it to Facebook and Apple’s approaches.

Basically, the compromises here seem necessary, in one form or another, and Google is actually getting people to coordinate around a workable form fairly quickly and fairly openly.