Tagged “pwas”

Last month I went to AMP Roadshow in Melbourne. Was a day of presentations and a bit of playing around with AMP stuff. AMP appears to be quite a different project to what it was three years ago.

AMP is no longer an ancronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages - now it’s the project name. This AMP is meant as more of a lightweight [citation needed] framework for making webapps, rather than just a way to get better Google rank and a ⚡ next to your page title.

Accelerated Mobile Pages faced some deserved backlash at first. Fixed top bars, hard-to-share links, and double loading to get to actual content were all big negatives. The limited interactive elements meant you got a very stripped down version of the page, and clicking on anything meant you usually loaded the full, now-even-more-bloated-because-we-assumed-AMP-would-take-care-of-it page.

The ‘keeping people on Google rather than their own servers’ aspect is an ongoing downside. But as a simple app framework it shows promise. Like what I had wanted from Polymer Elements but with a friendlier API. The better solution is obviously “just make faster pages”. But the industry has had a demonstrably hard time doing that and page bloat continues to grow out of control.

The AMP library contains a lot of components now and seems like a decent way to make a PWA (further research on this pending). It is probably too late to rename, but for many the name still carries a lot of baggage from the bad early days. Will be curious to see if it overcomes the rep, or that is just gradually forgotten.

Or if this is all just a ruse and it’s still a Google marketing play. Time will tell.