Tag: Amp

Ethan, eloquent as always, on the inaccessibly of AMP Stories:

Conjecture aside, here’s what I do know: the AMP team decided that each of these Story demos was worth showcasing on the official page for AMP Stories. And that sends a powerful signal about where the priorities for AMP Story sit. The content in each AMP Story is wonderful, the visual designs are effective—but if you use a screen reader, each Story is an assault on your senses. And by showcasing these demos, the AMP team is signaling that’s entirely acceptable.

It reminds me of Surma’s comments about JS frameworks and performance:

Unless a globally launched framework labels itself as exclusively targeting the users of the Wealthy Western Web, it has a responsibility to help developers target every phone on The Widening Performance Gap™️ spectrum.

It’s a big responsibility, but if you’re shipping something that will be this widely used, you’ve got a responsibility to make the default state as secure, accessible and performant as possible.

That’s particularly true for something that makes as bold a claim, as aggressively, as AMP has always done.

Jeremy has been thinking about when the ends justify the means, a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot as of late as well.

When do the ends justify the means? Isn’t the whole point of having principles that they hold true even in the direst circumstances? Why even claim that corporations shouldn’t influence politics if you’re going to make an exception for net neutrality? Why even claim that free speech is sacrosanct if you make an exception for nazi scum?

Those two examples are pretty extreme and I can easily justify the exceptions to myself. Net neutrality is too important. Stopping fascism is too important. But where do I draw the line? At what point does something become “too important?”

It’s a lovely post that connects dots between censorship, AMP, HTTPS as a requirement for new features and more.

Ethan was inspired by an Ursula Franklin lecture (I really have to read that book) to write a bit more about what we, as a community, can do about AMP. It looks a bit grim, as he points out.

And today, right now, I don’t think we need to look further than AMP to see an example of what Franklin’s talking about. As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google’s proprietary AMP standard, and against those of us who’d ask this question: What can I do about AMP?

But he goes on to point out that we can, and should, still speak up about our concerns and rally together:

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth speaking up, individually and collectively, and writing about our concerns. Quite the opposite. In fact, that’s why I signed an open letter on AMP, alongside twenty other concerned colleagues. (If you or your organization has a GitHub account, you can sign it, too.) Perhaps together, we can make the issue more visible, and make more people and organizations aware of our concerns. So while there might not be much I can do about AMP, maybe there’s something we can do.