I am not sure the position I am taking here is for everyone, in fact I am sure that many organizations producing much better content than me will strongly disagree. However, my position on AMP has changed from “let’s see” to a firm “absolutely no chance”. As I wrote my original post on how DasBlog could be modified to support AMP, it was not until the final moment that I actually understood how caching was changing how consumers would interact with my content. If I may quote myself:
You actually go to this:
https://www.google.com/amp/poppastring.com/blog/IntegratingGooglesAMPProject.aspx?amp=1/
I understand why caching is important for further speed improvements but I am very protective of my URL, and it feels like I am ceding control to Google somehow. I am hoping that the promised SEO bump will be worth the sacrifice, we shall see.
So that is awful, what else?
One of my knee jerk reactions to hearing “Open Source” attached to a project is to assume that the community has selected and is indeed driving a particular change, and that notion is not even close to the truth, and its frankly naïve conjecture.
The worst problem with AMP is that it has happily eschewed the most important standard on the web, HTML, for something else. This alternate HTML forced me to either rewrite all my content (going back 10 plus years) or create a ham-fisted HttpModule that modified my content on demand. Then, without a hint of irony, compels you to remove your own JavaScript files (because they are bad and slow) and include alternate JavaScript library, the only difference is that but Google controls it.
My conclusion is that we can do fast, mobile web apps without AMP, the techniques are well documented and losing control of your URL is not worth the caching benefits.
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