Trust corporate America to take something as simple as loading a text article into a digital “experience”. What the hell even is that? (Its marketing jargon for ads, I know). Talk about a circle jerk around the marketing table though.

  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    AMP was two different things.

    1. Google defined a standard that was an approved subset of html/css/js designed to load quickly on mobile screens, with none of the extra cruft that slows down sites as experienced by phone users.
    2. Google also agreed to host AMP-compliant pages on their own ultra-fast servers. Many smaller sites, especially local news stations and local newspapers, agreed to offload the extra work by allowing Google to host their content. Those hosted pages had a whole system of referring back to the canonical URL on the actual outlet’s own website (and the desktop version of the page), and had little things referring to the AMP project.

    I was 100% on board with #1, but #2 was controversial and created a lot of the conflicts of interest that tore the whole thing apart. Google spun off the AMP project as an open governance model, and then it was taken over by the OpenJS foundation.

    In the end, the performance gap between mobile devices and desktops narrowed, and at this point most people’s phones and mobile browsers can load pages just as quickly as a laptop, so the purpose of the project itself is less important to the actual web as it exists today.