On AMP for Email
I don&#x27;t know why people keep getting this wrong, but AMP does not introduce proprietary browser extensions or syntax. It&#x27;s a custom element framework, not much different than say, React and JSX, or Vue, Ember, or tools such as LESS&#x2F;SASS.<p>In fact, its even more &#x27;webby&#x27; than those because at least some browsers don&#x27;t need polyfills for Web Components, and the declarative nature is more transparent than a virtual dom app with embedded data. Web Components was created so that browsers could use custom elements, like say &lt;pay-with-bitcoin-button&#x2F;&gt; or &lt;x-video codec=&quot;daala&quot; src=&quot;foo.daala&quot;&#x2F;&gt; AMPHTML is an implementation of that.<p>Everyday like clockwork, new frameworks appear on HN that introduce yet another way to create web content that eschews the vanilla approach, AMP is about as close to vanilla as you can get.<p>There&#x27;s a separate issue if your concern is Google SERP giving preference to AMP or the way it is being rendered in a carousel, but that&#x27;s a political argument around the deployment, it&#x27;s not a technical argument against having a simple subset that unsophisticated developers can use to create fast loading apps, like Twitter bootstrap helped many devs create proper HTML5 content.<p>Otherwise common inaccurate statements are that AMP Cache is Google-only, when in fact, it&#x27;s a spec others can implement, and CloudFlare already provides a competing implementation.<p>I get why people have legitimate gripes over AMP: URL&#x2F;bookmarking&#x2F;canonical linking behavior, scrolling behavior on Safari, the way its rendered in Google.com,  perceptions that if you create a fast site that is AMP-like, but doesn&#x27;t use AMP, you don&#x27;t know how it&#x27;s going to be scored, etc. I think those are all legitimate concerns, but the hyperbole over the syntax seems very misplaced: AMP isn&#x27;t Flash or ActiveX, it runs on open web browsers without modification on top of standard specs.<p>Over and over again, people say &quot;but you don&#x27;t need AMP, you can make fast mobile sites by hand!&quot;  That&#x27;s like saying &quot;You don&#x27;t need Web frameworks, you can make great apps with VanillaJS and HTML&quot;, the only problem is, history has shown that most web developers can&#x27;t, and absent some framework codifying good behaviors, badness accumulates overtime until things get so bad that users turn away from the web altogether to native apps. You&#x27;ll find years later complaining about how Apple News killed the mobile web and why you&#x27;re forced to get your content approved by gated native News apps, because of overly optimistic beliefs that the wild wild west of news publisher web jockeys would all create optimal, consistent mobile browser experiences without assistance or any industry effort to standardize some best practices.<p>BTW, we&#x27;ve been down this road before. Remember XHTML Mobile?