That’s not to say there aren’t some really smart things happening in the AMP JS library or the cache – there are. From Barnes & Noble to Aritzia, Fluevog to Linus Bicycles, these things are seemingly everywhere. And then there are those gigantic full-width header images that dominate the top of every page, as though every two-hundred-word article on a news site was the equivalent of a magazine feature. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article. The combination of huge images that serve little additional purpose than decoration, several scripts that track how far you scroll on a page, and dozens of scripts that are advertising related means that text-based webpages are now obese and torpid and excreting a casual contempt for visitors. That means that webpages can’t be littered with arbitrary and numerous tracking and advertiser scripts, and that, of course, leads to a dramatically faster page. Launched in February 2016, AMP is a collection of standard HTML elements and AMP-specific elements on a special ostensibly-lightweight page that needs an 80 kilobyte JavaScript file to load correctly. No, it’s just because AMP restricts the kinds of elements that can be used on a page and severely limits the scripts that can be used.
It’s a concession publishers are willing to make in exchange for the enhanced distribution Google provides, but that they hesitate to make for their canonical versions. It isn’t necessarily because AMP pages are better for users, though that’s absolutely a consideration, but because Google wants it to be popular. They insist that this is because AMP pages are faster and, therefore, better for users, but that’s not a complete explanation for three reasons: AMP pages aren’t inherently faster than non-AMP pages, high-performing non-AMP pages are not mixed with AMP versions, and Google has a conflict of interest in promoting the format. Some of this stuff is amazing: in 2006, Apple added movies to the iTunes Store that were 640 × 480 pixels, but you can now stream movies in HD resolution and (pretend) 4K. These much higher speeds also allow us to see more detailed photos, and that’s very nice. Contacts who aren’t in your BlackBerry address book also need to be added there. While it’s true that American inventor Ralph Morris based his idea for electric Christmas lights on a telephone switchboard in 1908, it was actually an associate of Thomas Edison’s who was responsible for the first Christmas tree to be lit up using electricity.
Based on the story of Adam and Eve, the play featured a Paradise Tree in the Garden of Eden that was decorated with apples to symbolize Eve’s temptation. A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. I’ve published over 100 npm packages. But first, a short parenthetical: I’ve been writing posts in both long- and short-form about this stuff for a while, but I wanted to bring many threads together into a single document that may pretentiously be described as a theory of or, more practically, a guide to the bullshit web. I have no access to ComScore’s Media Metrix statistics, so I don’t know exactly how many of those millions of video starts were stopped instantly by either the visitor frantically pressing every button in the player until it goes away or just closing the tab in desperation, but I suspect it’s approximately every single one of them. You just need to know where to start and how to keep taking small and achievable steps to reach your goal of a healthier and trimmer you. You know how building wider roads doesn’t improve commute times, as it simply encourages people to drive more?
Building interactivity into the experience was also discussed. Large platform companies like Salesforce, Oracle, SAP and Adobe are trying to own the digital customer experience market from top to bottom, which includes providing support for marketing, commerce, personalization, and data management, in addition to content and experience management and more. It helps to have experience in the park’s major projects, especially construction and maintenance. Finally, there are a bunch of elements that have become something of a standard with modern website design that, while not offensively intrusive, are often unnecessary. But a lot of the stuff we’re seeing is a pile-up of garbage on seemingly every major website that does nothing to make visitors happier – if anything, much of this stuff is deeply irritating and morally indefensible. The average internet connection in the United States is about six times as fast as it was just ten years ago, but instead of making it faster to browse the same types of websites, we’re simply occupying that extra bandwidth with more stuff. AMP’s restrictions mean less stuff. At the time, a few of my friends were getting cable internet.