Arrival of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPP)

Every form, sooner or later, metamorphoses or undergoes changes until it reaches its divine form, its Enlightenment. For example, stone metamorphosized to become diamond. Reptiles metamorphosized to become bird. Apes metamorphosized into you and me. And guess what, Google has taken upon themselves to revolutionize mobile page. Boom!! We have Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Over last few years, mobile has become the new desktop, surpassing the old world era and large sized equipment. Readers tend to expect a lot out of a web page full of interactions. A poorly loaded page or delay in page load, there goes your user never to return. The need to dramatically transform mobile page experience propelled Google towards Accelerated Mobile Pages.

What's it made up of?
Accelerated Mobile Pages Project is based on AMP HTML which is a new open framework built out of existing web technologies. The framework lets web pages come up with light-weight version of the same page, which loads easier and faster. The technical specification can be obtained from GitHub.

Highlights of AMP

• Constraints on JavaScript

JavaScript is the core building block for advanced web apps, but for static content it may not always be required: for a headline, some text and an image you do not need JS. Looking further into the content being created on the web nowadays, there are, however, things like lightboxes, various embeds, polls, quizzes and other interactive features that cannot easily be implemented without JavaScript. AMP components may have JavaScript under the hood, but it is coordinated with other AMP components, so its composition into the page doesn’t cause performance degradation. 

• No Ads & Analytics with JavaScript

AMP HTML is taking the following approach to analytics: so-called “tracking pixels” can be embedded into AMP documents as long as they don’t use JavaScript. AMPP's vision is to deploy a single, unified, auditable, high performance, open source analytics library with AMP HTML that can report to various existing analytics provider backends, so it is possible to use the existing ecosystem without overloading a page with analytics software.

AMP HTML doesn’t allow JavaScript so ads cannot be directly embedded – instead they live in sandboxed iframes with no access to the primary document. Relying on iframes solves some of the worst performance pitfalls with ads, in particular with respect to document.write.

• Prerendering

AMP documents are from the ground up designed to be efficiently pre-renderable. Browsers have long supported pre-rendering through the <link rel=prerender> tag, but they need to be conservative about this mechanism because prerendering can be expensive.

• Resources must declare their sizing up-front

Document authors have to state resource sizes explicitly. This doesn’t mean that resources can’t be responsive – they can be, but their aspect ratio or dimensions needs to be inferable from the HTML alone. This means that after initial layout, an AMP document does not change until user action. An ad at the top of the page can’t suddenly say: “I want to be 200 pixels high instead of 50.”

Google intends to extend AMP endeavor to several platforms and devices. Publishers and technologists have welcomed the initiative with open arms. The technology partners willing to integrate AMP HTML pages include Twitter, Adobe Analytics, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Pinterest, Parse.ly and Linkedln.

At the end of the Tunnel
Google's advocacy remains to be faster, easier and better flow of information, by everybody, from anywhere. And of course, as always all open.