Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project Live
Google, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Wordpress.com, and 30 other content partners have unveiled the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project.
Specifically:
Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant — no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages….
On October 7th, 2015, the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project announced the release of the initial technical specification which will appear on GitHub, a broadly used repository for open-source content. We are also providing an early developer demo of what a faster mobile web can look and feel like with Accelerated Mobile Pages. More features and functionality will be added over the coming weeks, including functional support for subscription models as well as vendor support for advertising functionality.
Enrique Dans describes it this way:
In simple terms, AMP is a collection of restrictions on the functions that can be used in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, giving significantly better performance. The idea is to keep the elements that can be uploaded quickly on a page and to do without those that take longer: no script created by the user or third parties, no multimedia elements other than those specifically designed for it, and nothing whose consumption of resources we cannot control with an iron hand. The functions that we used to carry out with these resources that are now “proscribed” will be done with specially created elements.
If to this we add extremely efficient caching procedures, we can come up with pages that load almost immediately, giving users a notably better experience.
Also you can see a good run down of it here, and of course, the official announcement post on it here, project page here, and GitHub here.
And as all of this seems reactive to Facebook’s effort at optimized “instant articles” news pages inside the Facebook ecosystem, it seems key that AMP is ad independent: “the objective is to provide support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies in Accelerated Mobile Pages…as with their existing websites, publishers control their ad inventory and how they sell it.”
Jeff Jarvis seems excited by it:
I’m looking into it now in more depth. Curious what the community here thinks of it.
