AMP and it’s purpose explained
So mobile internet has come a long way since the days of downloading sick ringtones to our flip phones but using a browser on the latest smartphones still presents some challenges such as clunky advertisements that take up the whole screen. When you’re about to scroll down poor responsiveness caused by too much page clutter and spotty connections in some areas that can all be incredibly frustrating and all of these issues were the inspiration for Google’s AMP project.
Something you’ve probably taken advantage of without even realizing it. You see whenever you run a Google search on the mobile device you might notice a small lightning bolt icon beside a given search result to let you know that if you click on it, you’ll be served an amp version of that page. Now this page won’t come to you directly from the site you’re trying to view instead after the administrator of the site creates an amp version of the page it’ll be automatically pushed to a CDN or content delivery network and by Google or CloudFlare.
These amp caches then push the page to your phone with the goal of improving loading times, but this isn’t the only difference between an amp and a regular page. If one of your favorite sites often takes a long time to load the culprit may not be a server with a slow connection instead there might be complicated HTML elements that take a long time for your browser to render, poorly written CSS that makes the page looks like a mess or scripts to ask for more resources than your device can easily deal with.
So, instead of allowing website owners to design their pages however they want amp uses its own customized and stripped-down versions of HTML and JavaScript. These prevent the implementation of layouts that are less clunky or disruptive to the user.
One of the amps built-in restrictions is that as could only take up a certain amount of space on the screen and it will mostly be the actual content you want to see rather than the scammer screaming at you about the fat-busting juice.
AMP is also smart enough to judge the relative importance of each element of the webpage, so, if you’re trying to read an article about the latest big scandal, it’ll try to load things like the article text and an unflattering picture of your local politician. All this with limiting other resource, hogging effects like animations and amp ends up doing a pretty decent job of making the mobile browsing experience less rage, inspiring overall behavior.
AMP Limitations
The restrictions on page elements and style work best for news articles consisting of mostly text and a few still images. For highly interactive websites which are suited to a desktop browser, but if you are doing amp for your browsing on mobile. You will notice a very destructive mode of browsing experience on the amp.
