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A lot of people are going to "cheer" this move but this is yet another anti-web move that Apple has made without regard to standards or how it will affect other areas of tech. Apple has a clear record of flouting standardized technologies in Safari like breaking iframe sizing in iOS mobile and not supporting many common APIs and is very opaque about whether or not they even view the web as a first class citizen. The code I work on almost has as many Safari hacks as we have IE hacks.

If Apple would stick to just making great hardware and products and follow the standards like other vendors do then I feel like the whole tech world would be better off.

Edit: Apparently I need to spell out in more detail my arguments because if read at surface level people only focus on AMP. This isn't about AMP. This is about sharing a link to something you are viewing. You are currently viewing the AMP page and that might look a certain way or even contain a certain type of graph that looks a certain way because it's static and fast to load. If you click Share and send this to a friend they will receive an entirely different page that might look different than what you were seeing. I don't think it's a good thing that we can no longer trust sharing a page with someone else. Now the ultimate destination is being edited behind the scenes without you knowing. It's a slippery slope that, like other things Apple has done, have possibly bad consequences in the future. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions after all.



I don't understand how you see AMP pages representing a standard web? AMP represents the complete opposite of web standards and anything to remove it from the web leaves us all better off.


Opposite of web standards? It's HTTP+HTML+JS+CSS. What part of AMP isn't standards compliant?


The AMP client source is available but worthless. Google validates that you're running their blessed version of the framework and if you change a single bit in the files Google doesn't serve your AMP content anymore.

It's a classic walled garden, like the Android app store. You can develop Android apps that don't meet their guidelines but you can't distribute them through normal channels.


The Play Store is pretty liberal in what they allow, more so than the Apple App store atleast.


Right, so its closed source? Still standards compliant.


OP is complaining about Safari not supporting the most recent APIs, whereas AMP supports only an extremely limited subset of all those technologies.

But I believe the larger issue is how it makes URL meaningless, and futures a centralisation of the web. It's not against the standard, but certainly the spirit of the web as it was supposed to be.


What part of AMP isn't standards compliant?

The part that mandates including js from a corporation on your pages.


Yes, using a javascript framework requires you to have that javascript on your page.


Not AMP per se but just how Apple make sweeping changes by fiat without soliciting feedback that affect how standard technologies are used throughout the web. This is just another move they've made that will force whole industries to adapt for no reason other than Apple wanted to do it.


Google created it to consolidate control of content on their platform to get people to get used to a specific UI provided by Google. There are other companies that hold caches, but the design and implementation is essentially chosen by Google (note that the fact that the AMP privacy policy just leads to the Google privacy policy). I can completely understand why Apple would want to get rid of it -- it adds a Google UI to the article that otherwise wouldn't have it and it isn't necessary to see the content.

Edit: clarified about AMP usage and Google's involvement.


> The only company that I know of that uses AMP is Google

Google and Micorosft (Bing) have caches. I think Twitter does to (they definitely use AMP). Lots of other social media and other platforms use and highlight AMP content, and I think there are a couple other big players with caches, too.

It's definitely not just Google.


I'll edit it to say that Google is the gatekeeper, not the only ones that hold caches.


thats not true. amp is a collection of best practices to speed up the web!


Amp doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of best practices, what is new is agglomerating even more online content under Google's control via caching. Lightweight page design never became impossible, it's simply that most websites couldn't care less about investing work into improvements.


It is? So how do I get the advantages in Google search (being ranked in the carousel right above the top result) without running the official JS from Google’s CDN?

I can’t even use the JS from a local CDN.


Do you know what AMP is? How it is used?

In this case Apple is literally helping you and publishers not get screwed. I think you need to read up on AMP, because seeing the words 'standard technologies' and 'AMP' in the same comment in that way is extremely awkward.


> In this case Apple is literally helping you and publishers not get screwed.

I'm not getting screwed by AMP, and neither, AFAICT, are publishers.


My comment is focused on Apple's behavior and not AMP specifically. I do know how AMP works.

I don't like how Apple unilaterally changes the way that things work (even if that means AMP) without regard to any other parties.


What about when google unilaterally change the way lots of websites work by forcing AMP down my throat?

They have the biggest search engine by far. They have the most popular mobile OS by far.

But it's Apple you're mad at?


While that can be a bad thing, in this specific case it is curtailing a similar abusive overreach by google, and IMO a good thing.

You can use exactly the same arguement you made against AMP, I don't see negating AMP as some great evil.


Yea it's really rare for me to interpret a situation as Apple making a pro-consumer move and Google being anti-consumer[1], but here we are.

[1] or more charitably appealing to a subset of users at high cost to a non-trivial fractions of other users


Only thing in my opinion that is anti-web here is Google with AMP. AMP is anty-web - it is everything that web is not.


If Google is the one pushing all those standards they are "standards" only on paper and no longer serve as standards.


Apple are sharing the canonical URL provided in the page source. That's actually recommended behaviour in the AMP spec. So if anyone is breaking anything, the only option would be that Google's AMP is 'breaking the web' in their standard.

So the issue isn't that you haven't spelled out your argument in proper detail, but that you're just incorrect.


Now that Google has confirmed that they asked Apple to make this change I fully admit that I was wrong. I wish I could edit my post.




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