I still don't get AMP. It's a different markup. Am I supposed to detect mobile devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the responsive design that we've been fighting for? And why is it for mobile only? If it's so fast, why not make it general purpose?
Google are very good at pumping out "standards" that fill short term commercial goals while in the meantime making a fragmented pig's breakfast of the rest of the web. Aside from HTML 5 (which I'm coming to accept was justifiably hostile to the W3 process), I have yet to see anything from Quic, SPDY, WebSockets, and now AMP that demonstrates any kind of long term thinking.
WebSockets for a long time (is it still true?) could not run over a SPDY/HTTP 2 connection. SPDY itself had multiple fundamentally incompatible versions in the wild before things settled down (they changed how negotiation was implemented), WebSockets and SPDY duplicate many of the same concepts (yes, really), Quic seems utterly ignorant of the early history of the Internet and the importance of flow control, and now AMP.
AMP it seems to me, is a standard designed around the current era shortcomings in the implementation of Google Chrome (and similar browsers). It's hard to get more myopic than that.
> Am I supposed to detect mobile devices (which is a massive pain) and serve them this separate HTML/JS/CSS?
No. It's the responsibility of search engines and apps to choose whether to send visitors to AMP pages. If Google crawls your site and finds AMP pages, it'll send mobile users to them from search.
