Just wanted to give the author a shoutout for being awesome. This article is published with an AMP version[0] too, which is pretty unusual for smaller blogging sites.
AMP articles are so much easier on my eyes (and the author can't include their own javascript on an AMP page, so there is less bloat). I wish all bloggers started to publish AMP pages.
AMP is not the solution. Anyone willing to use AMP to reduce bloat could also just not add bloat to HTML pages in the first place. And, using AMP itself adds bloat[1]. I couldn’t even read the author’s AMP version without enabling JavaScript.
I agree that their current process should become more democratic, and that this is a real concern. There is also benefit in moving quickly to try and solve a real problem and prove that this approach will work. I'm still cautiously optimistic.
All open source projects have some kind of "central control" in the sense that they can accept or reject pull requests and define what the official version is.
But you can fork them, so it should be okay, right?
This is what really confuses me about AMP. All it does, really, is force authors to strip their page down to core, performant components.
Another way to do that is to strip your page down to core, performant components without loading a JS library from Google. But Google dangles the carrot of improved SEO with AMP, so everyone has to do it anyway.
(note: they don't actually prioritise AMP pages, they prioritise page load speed. But AMP pages are put inside a Google CDN, so, what do you know, they load fastest)
> Anyone willing to use AMP to reduce bloat could also just not add bloat to HTML pages in the first place.
AMP is not meant for page authors — usually, they are painfully aware of how much bloat they add. They don't have a choice when sustainability is in the balance.
AMP is for the ad networks. It draws sane restrictions to what they can do. On their end, ad networks agree to that because Google is a large partner of them and because the worst possible outcome would be having everybody use ad blockers.
> They don't have a choice when sustainability is in the balance.
This is not solved by AMP, it's absolutely the choice of publishers.
> AMP is for the ad networks.
Not really, you can see their official roadmap. Many of the original principles have already changed and many of the intrusive ad formats are already back in (like autoplay outstream video units). The only real optimization is better async loading which could already be done with proper coding by publishers and ad networks.
I can read all mentioned pages with NoScript enabled. But fully agreed that static pages such as blogs shouldn't require JS to show the primary content.
One example: in my static blog I provide very nice maths using MathJax, but I also provide fallback PNG renders of the formulae. The small JS my blog has, it reads these pictures' alt texts and renders the latex if found. This stuff is not rocket science, people just don't want to spend time on this kind of stuff.
That would be a reasonable exception. Of course, I'd only give the page a 5/5 rating if the JS code would be still readable even if no output would be produced.
Echoing others, as blog posts go, that's the exception and not the rule. Inline demos are furthermore not "primary content" but supplementary material.
This isn't really a solution when many authors use a CMS, like WordPress and others, where the bloat is built-in. Sure you can write a custom theme etc, but not everyone (1) has the ability to do that, and (2) wants to dedicate the time to do that.
I'd be a lot happier with AMP if they'd stop hijacking the scrolling behavior on iOS (speed and momentum is different than on a regular web page). It drives me absolutely crazy.
Oh no!! I never heard of AMP before but now I hate it with a passion. Anything that spreads the terrible gmail style scrolling behavior is all bad in my eyes.
It's the bottom border that looks off when wrapping. Since the headings are already distinguished by whitespace, size, weight, and color, the border doesn't really add anything. Overall, the page is not conveying a hierarchy to me at all. It looks very disjointed.
My preference would be to remove the borders/underlines, also remove the bold, and make the margins equal above and below the h3+ headings. If I were to actually use more than three headings, I'd probably do something completely different at the deepest levels (e.g. inline the headings or indent the whole text).
But I think we agree that it's worth some effort to fix up the browser's default styles. It's too bad they can't all just switch to something like Firefox's reader view without breaking the web.
So, I'm really not a graphics designer, though I know what I like, what I don't like, and have a pretty good sense for what does and doesn't work well across a large range of display sizes.
This design isn't responsive other than having some reasonably sane defaults. It's derived from a more complex style that does resize headers and such as the pagesize varies. As far as niggling over header formatting ... that's getting into layout-weenie stuff and sweating the small stuff. The point is to have distinguishable headers. How you distinguish them ... is somewhat moot, though size, colour, underline, margin, typeface, etc., are some obvious dimensions. What I've given here does not, I'll posit, for the most part suck.
It may offend some sensibilities.
What I've started taking a strong liking to, actually, is using CSS numbering to create numbered sections (see https://reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq for an example -- I actually contributed the Reddit code, all one line of it, to enable this). It's a bit technical-documentation-ish, but tends to give a sense of place and structure within a document.
In practice, having too many levels of nesting is probably distracting. A book might have: Parts, Chapters, Sections, and possibly Subsections. That's H2 - H5 in a standard HTML hierarchy, with H1 reserved for the title.
A paper will rarely have more than Sections and Subsections -- H2 and H3 elements, plus h1 for the title. My reddit styling and docs tend to reflect this.
I will use more detailed breakouts when I'm outlining stuff, though I'll make pains to try to flatten the structure reasonably as I can. I'm often digging in the weeds myself, in complex topics, and achieving a workable structure is a considerable effort.
But nobody actually makes web sites like that any more. Have you seen the one for Emacs? It looks like a page for some barista's Node.js side project, it's got so much hipster cruft now.
> I wish all bloggers started to publish AMP pages.
I wish all bloggers with sites so bloated that AMP is a fundamental difference didn't feel they needed to include large image assets, custom fonts, and fancy JavaScript libraries (not suggesting this blogger does - just a general complaint).
In case there are any Wordpress bloggers and authors out there who would like to add AMP functionality to their websites Automattic put together a nice plugin tool to do just that.[0] I wonder when this will become part of the wp-core?
AMP articles are so much easier on my eyes (and the author can't include their own javascript on an AMP page, so there is less bloat). I wish all bloggers started to publish AMP pages.
[0] - http://applehelpwriter.com/2016/08/29/discovering-how-dropbo...