Tags: google,amp

In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google:

The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken.

He’s absolutely right.

But…

Have you ever clicked on a result from a search engine? Unless you’re lucky enough to land on a nice personal website, you’re more than likely to be confronted with pop-ups to allow tracking, or a desparate plea to subscribe to a newsletter, or just rubbish ads all accompanied by a slow page loading somewhere in the mix.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that what Google is doing is okay. But let’s not pretend that everything indexed by Google is just fine and dandy for people to visit.

And of course the main reason why websites are so terrible is because they’ve tied their business model to heaps of behavioral advertising driven by invasive tracking courtesy of …Google.

This reminds me of AMP. Remember Google AMP? It was a terrible solution to a real problem. Web pages were (and still are) bloated and slow. The correct solution would be to encourage people to fix that, but instead Google mandated a proprietary format for your content that had to be hosted on their servers.

AMP was a disaster, both in practical terms and in the reputational damage it did to Google’s developer relations.

Now they’re doing it again, powerwashing away any goodwill they ever had with site owners. Now Google doesn’t even send search engine traffic to the websites that host the ads that Google encouraged people to put on every page.

It’s almost as if Google is a company so large and with so many competing interests that it now suffers from an incurable split personality disorder.

Personally I think they’re missing a trick. They should be using “AI” summaries as a stick.

If your site is slow, or filled with user-hostile annoyances then it should be cockblocked by a hallucinated summary. But a nice fast respectful website? Send the traffic their way! Everyone wins—users, site owners, Google, the World Wide Web.

Could you imagine how quickly this would revolutionise the world of search engine optimisation? They’ve always told us that we should make websites for humans in order to get good Google juice. This would be a way of making it come true, without any of the over-engineered woefulness of AMP.

It’ll never happen of course. But I can dream.

If you’re a fan of gratuitous initialisms, you’ll love Google’s core web vitals. Just get a load of the obfuscation in the important-sounding metrics like CLS, FCP, LCP, and more.

To be fair to Google, this is a problem in the web performance world in general. Practioners prefer to talk about TTFB rather than “time to first byte” even though both contain exactly the same number of syllables.

The big news in the web performance community this month is the arrival of a new initialism. INP sounds like one of those pseudo-scientific psychologic profiles but it’s meant to stand for Interaction to Next Paint (even if they were to swear off pointless initialisms, you’d still have to pry Pointless Capitalisation from Google’s cold dead hands).

This new metric is a welcome one. It’s replacing first input delay. Sorry, First Input Delay, or FID, one of the few web vital initialisms that can be spoken as a word, making it a true acronym (fortunately fid’s successor, inp, also works as an acronym).

First Input Delay has long outstayed its welcome. It was always an outlier in the core web vitals. It didn’t seem to measure anything actually useful. I know it sounds like it’s measuring the delay until the user can interact with a web page, but when you dive into what it actually does, it’s a mess:

FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (that is, when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction.

See that word “begin” in there? It’s doing a lot of work. First Input Delay doesn’t measure the lag between the user interaction and the browser response; it only measures the lag between the user interaction and the browser beginning to respond. The actual response could take ages, but that lag doesn’t get measured. Unlike the other core web vitals, this metric is very far removed from what actually matters to the user’s experience.

What the fid where they thinking? How the fid did this measurement ever get included in core web vitals in the first place?

Well, feel free to take what I’m about to say as pure gossip, but I have my sources, I trust ’em, and no, I’m not going to reveal ’em…

It’s because of AMP.

Remember Google AMP? An acronym so pointless they eventually just forgot it ever stood for anything?

The AMP project ended up doing incredible damage to Google’s developer relations. By colluding with the search team to privilege the appearance of AMP pages in the top news carousel, Google effectively blackmailed the entire publishing industry into using their format.

In the end, it didn’t work. It was a shit format. All they did was foster resentment and animosity:

AMP seems to have faded away. Most publishers have started dropping support, and even Google doesn’t seem to care much anymore.

It turns out that Google search wasn’t the only team infected by AMP. The core web vitals team also had to play ball.

Originally they had a genuinely useful metric for measuring the lag between input and response. But guess which pages did terribly? That’s right: AMP pages.

Rather than ship an actually-useful measurement, the core web vitals team instead had to include the broken First Input Delay, brainchild of a certain someone on the AMP team.

Now it all makes sense.

So good riddance to FID. Welcome to INP. And here’s hoping it won’t be much longer till we’re finally burying AMP.

Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over - The Verge

AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.

This is a really good oral history of how AMP soured Google’s reputation.

Full disclosure: I’m briefly cited:

“When it suited them, it was open-source,” says Jeremy Keith, a web developer and a former member of AMP’s advisory council. “But whenever there were any questions about direction and control… it was Google’s.”

As an aside, this article contains a perfect description of the company cultures of Facebook, Apple, and Google:

“You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”

Spot. On.

The Proprietary Syndication Formats - Chris Coyier

Guess which format is going to outlast all these proprietary syndication formats. I’d say RSS, which I believe to be true, but really, it’s HTML.

What happened when we disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing?

Shockingly little. So you should try it, too.

Tough questions at Chrome Dev Summit’s AMA session • The Register

Forgive me for linking to The Rag, but for completeness’s sake, it would be remiss of me not to point out more coverage of “that” question I asked:

It was to the company’s credit that it chose to take the question posed by Clearleft’s Jeremy Keith, well known in the web standards community and who was briefly on the advisory committee for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), before resigning saying that “it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product.” AMP has been in the news of late with a lawsuit alleging Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote it, and Keith asked: “Given the court proceedings against AMP, why should anyone trust FLOC or any other Google initiatives ostensibly focused on privacy?”

AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-led Initiatives – WP Tavern

An article by Sarah Gooding, prompted by the question I asked at Chrome Dev Summit:

Jeremy Keith’s question referencing the AMP allegations in the recently unredacted antitrust complaint against Google was extremely unlikely to receive an adequate response from the Chrome Leadership team, but the mere act of asking is a public reminder of the trust Google has willfully eroded in pushing AMP on publishers.

Chrome Dev Summit kicked off yesterday. The opening keynote had its usual share of announcements.

There was quite a bit of talk about privacy, which sounds good in theory, but then we were told that Google would be partnering with “industry stakeholders.” That’s probably code for the kind of ad-tech sharks that have been making a concerted effort to infest W3C groups. Beware.

But once Una was on-screen, the topics shifted to the kind of design and development updates that don’t have sinister overtones.

My favourite moment was when Una said:

We’re also partnering with Jeremy Keith of Clearleft to launch Learn Responsive Design on web.dev. This is a free online course with everything you need to know about designing for the new responsive web of today.

This is what’s been keeping me busy for the past few months (and for the next month or so too). I’ve been writing fifteen pieces—or “modules”—on modern responsive web design. One third of them are available now at web.dev/learn/design:

1. Introduction
2. Media queries
3. Internationalization
4. Macro layouts
5. Micro layouts

The rest are on their way: typography, responsive images, theming, UI patterns, and more.

I’ve been enjoying this process. It’s hard work that requires me to dive deep into the nitty-gritty details of lots of different techniques and technologies, but that can be quite rewarding. As is often said, if you truly want to understand something, teach it.

Oh, and I made one more appearance at the Chrome Dev Summit. During the “Ask Me Anything” section, quizmaster Una asked the panelists a question from me:

Given the court proceedings against AMP, why should anyone trust FLOC or any other Google initiatives ostensibly focused on privacy?

(Thanks to Jake for helping craft the question into a form that could make it past the legal department but still retain its spiciness.)

The question got a response. I wouldn’t say it got an answer. My verdict remains:

I’m not sure that Google Chrome can be considered a user agent.

The fundamental issue is that you’ve got a single company that’s the market leader in web search, the market leader in web advertising, and the market leader in web browsers. I honestly believe all three would function better—and more honestly—if they were separate entities.

Monopolies aren’t just damaging for customers. They’re damaging for the monopoly too. I’d love to see Google Chrome compete on being a great web browser without having to also balance the needs of surveillance-based advertising.

Inspired by Terence Eden’s example, I applied for membership of the AMP advisory committee last year. To my surprise, my application was successful.

I’ve spent the time since then participating in good faith, but I can’t do that any longer. Here’s what I wrote in my resignation email:

Hi all,

As mentioned at the end of the last call, I’m stepping down from the AMP advisory committee.

I can’t in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source.

If I were to remain on the advisory committee, my feelings of resentment about this situation would inevitably affect my behaviour. So it’s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’d like to thank the OpenJS Foundation for allowing me to participate. It’s been an honour to watch Tobie and Jory in action.

I wish everyone well and I hope that the advisory committee can successfully guide the AMP project towards a happy place where it can live out its final days in peace.

I don’t have a replacement candidate to nominate but I’ll ask around amongst other independent sceptical folks to see if there’s any interest.

All the best,

Jeremy

I wrote about the fundamental problem with Google AMP when I joined the advisory committee:

This is an interesting time for AMP …whatever AMP is.

See, that’s been a problem with Google AMP from the start. There are multiple defintions of what AMP is.

There’s the collection of web components. If that were all AMP is, it would be a very straightforward project, similar to other collections of web components (like Polymer). But then there’s the concept of validation. The validation comes from a set of rules, defined by Google. And there’s the AMP cache, or more accurately, Google hosting.

Only one piece of that trinity—the collection of web components—is eligible for the label of being open source, and even that’s a stretch considering that most of the contributions come from full-time Google employees. The other two parts are firmly under Google’s control.

I was hoping it was a marketing problem. We spent a lot of time on the advisory committee trying to figure out ways of making it clearer what AMP actually is. But it was a losing battle. The phrase “the AMP project” is used to cover up the deeply interwingled nature of its constituent parts. Bits of it are open source, but most of it is proprietary. The OpenJS Foundation doesn’t seem like a good home for a mostly-proprietary project.

Whenever a representative from Google showed up at an advisory committee meeting, it was clear that they viewed AMP as a Google product. I never got the impression that they planned to hand over control of the project to the OpenJS Foundation. Instead, they wanted to hear what people thought of their project. I’m not comfortable doing that kind of unpaid labour for a large profitable organisation.

Even worse, Google representatives reminded us that AMP was being used as a foundational technology for other Google products: stories, email, ads, and even some weird payment thing in native Android apps. That’s extremely worrying.

While I was serving on the AMP advisory committee, a coalition of attorneys general filed a suit against Google for anti-competitive conduct:

Google designed AMP so that users loading AMP pages would make direct communication with Google servers, rather than publishers’ servers. This enabled Google’s access to publishers’ inside and non-public user data.

We were immediately told that we could not discuss an ongoing court case in the AMP advisory committee. That’s fair enough. But will it go both ways? Or will lawyers acting on Google’s behalf be allowed to point to the AMP advisory committee and say, “But AMP is an open source project! Look, it even resides under the banner of the OpenJS Foundation.”

If there’s even a chance of the AMP advisory committee being used as a Potempkin village, I want no part of it.

But even as I’m noping out of any involvement with Google AMP, my parting words have to be about how impressed I am with the OpenJS Foundation. Jory and Tobie have been nothing less than magnificent in their diplomacy, cat-herding, schedule-wrangling, timekeeping, and other organisational superpowers that I’m crap at.

I sincerely hope that Google isn’t taking advantage of the OpenJS Foundation’s kind-hearted trust.

I remember trying to convince people to use semantic markup because it’s good for accessibility. That tactic didn’t always work. When it didn’t, I would add “By the way, Google’s searchbot is indistinguishable from a screen-reader user so semantic markup is good for SEO.”

That usually worked. It always felt unsatisfying though. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter if people do the right thing for the wrong reasons. The end result is what matters. But still. It never felt great.

It happened with responsive design and progressive enhancement too. If I couldn’t convince people based on user experience benefits, I’d pull up some official pronouncement from Google recommending those techniques.

Even AMP, a dangerously ill-conceived project, has one very handy ace in the hole. You can’t add third-party JavaScript cruft to AMP pages. That’s useful:

Beleaguered developers working for publishers of big bloated web pages have a hard time arguing with their boss when they’re told to add another crappy JavaScript tracking script or bloated library to their pages. But when they’re making AMP pages, they can easily refuse, pointing out that the AMP rules don’t allow it. Google plays the bad cop for us, and it’s a very valuable role.

AMP is currently dying, which is good news. Google have announced that core web vitals will be used to boost ranking instead of requiring you to publish in their proprietary AMP format. The really good news is that the political advantage that came with AMP has also been ported over to core web vitals.

Take user-hostile obtrusive overlays. Perhaps, as a contientious developer, you’ve been arguing for years that they should be removed from the site you work on because they’re so bad for the user experience. Perhaps you have been met with the same indifference that I used to get regarding semantic markup.

Well, now you can point out how those annoying overlays are affecting, for example, the cumulative layout shift for the site. And that number is directly related to SEO. It’s one thing for a department to over-ride UX concerns, but I bet they’d think twice about jeopardising the site’s ranking with Google.

I know it doesn’t feel great. It’s like dealing with a bully by getting an even bigger bully to threaten them. Still. Needs must.

Google AMP is dead! AMP pages no longer get preferential treatment in Google search

I don’t know if AMP is quite dead yet, but it feels like it would be a mercy to press a pillow down on its face.

Google’s stated intention was to rank sites that load faster but they ended up ranking sites that use AMP instead. And the largest advertising company in the world dictating how websites can be built is not a way to a healthier and more open web.

Core web vitals from Google are the ingredients for an alphabet soup of exlusionary intialisms. But once you get past the unnecessary jargon, there’s a sensible approach underpinning the measurements.

From May—no, June—these measurements will be a ranking signal for Google search so performance will become more of an SEO issue. This is good news. This is what Google should’ve done years ago instead of pissing up the wall with their dreadful and damaging AMP project that blackmailed publishers into using a proprietary format in exchange for preferential search treatment. It was all done supposedly in the name of performance, but in reality all it did was antagonise users and publishers alike.

Core web vitals are an attempt to put numbers on user experience. This is always a tricky balancing act. You’ve got to watch out for the McNamara fallacy. Harry has already started noticing this:

A new and unusual phenomenon: clients reluctant (even refusing) to fix performance issues unless they directly improve Vitals.

Once you put a measurement on something, there’s a danger of focusing too much on the measurement. Chris is worried that we’re going to see tips’n’tricks for gaming core web vitals:

This feels like the start of a weird new era of web performance where the metrics of web performance have shifted to user-centric measurements, but people are implementing tricky strategies to game those numbers with methods that, if anything, slightly harm user experience.

The map is not the territory. The numbers are a proxy for user experience, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure intangible ideas like pain and frustration. As Laurie says:

This is 100% the downside of automatic tools that give you a “score”. It’s like gameification. It’s about hitting that perfect score instead of the holistic experience.

And Ethan has written about the power imbalance that exists when Google holds all the cards, whether it’s AMP or core web vitals:

Google used its dominant position in the marketplace to force widespread adoption of a largely proprietary technology for creating websites. By switching to Core Web Vitals, those power dynamics haven’t materially changed.

We would do well to remember:

When you measure, include the measurer.

But if we’re going to put numbers to user experience, the core web vitals are a pretty good spread of measurements: largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift, and first input delay.

(If you prefer using initialisms, remember that CFP is Certified Financial Planner, CLS is Community Legal Services, and FID is Flame Ionization Detector. Together they form CWV, Catholic War Veterans.)

Au revoir, mon AMPmour? — Ethan Marcotte

I’ll say again: deprioritizing AMP in favor of Core Web Vitals is a very good thing. But it’s worth noting that Google’s taken its proprietary document format, and swapped it out for a proprietary set of performance statistics that has even less external oversight.

The End of AMP – lafoo – ramblings about the online world

Google provided a distinct advantage to sites using AMP – priority placement on the world’s largest traffic source – Google search. I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement. Let me package that up for you – Google, the most dominant search engine globally – used that dominant market position to encourage publishers to adopt technology so that Google could store and serve publisher’s content on Google’s domain. How is that legal? Well, I’m not a lawyer, but it possibly isn’t.

The death of AMP can’t come soon enough.

If you’re currently using AMP, you’ll be able to get rid of that monstrosity in May, and if you aren’t, you’ll now be competing for search positions previously unavailable to you. For publishers, it is a win-win.

RFC 8752 - Report from the IAB Workshop on Exploring Synergy between Content Aggregation and the Publisher Ecosystem (ESCAPE)

During the workshop, several online publishers indicated that if it weren’t for the privileged position in the Google Search carousel given to AMP content, they would not publish in that format.

Ignore AMP · Jens Oliver Meiert

It started using the magic spell of prominent results page display to get authors to use it. Nothing is left of the original lure of raising awareness for web performance, and nothing convincing is there to confirm it was, indeed, a usable “web component framework.”

I was very inspired by something Terence Eden wrote on his blog last year. A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting:

I don’t like AMP. I think that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive.

So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP.

Like Terence, I’m not a fan of Google AMP—my initially positive reaction to it soured over time as it became clear that Google were blackmailing publishers by privileging AMP pages in Google Search. But all I ever did was bitch and moan about it on my website. Terence actually did something.

So this year I put myself forward as a candidate for the AMP advisory committee. I have no idea how the election process works (or who does the voting) but thanks to whoever voted for me. I’m now a member of the AMP advisory committee. If you look at that blog post announcing the election results, you’ll see the brief blurb from everyone who was voted in. Most of them are positively bullish on AMP. Mine is not:

Jeremy Keith is a writer and web developer dedicated to an open web. He is concerned that AMP is being unfairly privileged by Google’s search engine instead of competing on its own merits.

The good news is that main beef with AMP is already being dealt with. I wanted exactly what Terence said:

My recommendation is that Google stop requiring that organisations use Google’s proprietary mark-up in order to benefit from Google’s promotion.

That’s happening as of May of this year. Just as well—the AMP advisory committee have absolutely zero influence on Google search. I’m not sure how much influence we have at all really.

This is an interesting time for AMP …whatever AMP is.

See, that’s been a problem with Google AMP from the start. There are multiple defintions of what AMP is. At the outset, it seemed pretty straightforward. AMP is a format. It has a doctype and rules that you have to meet in order to be “valid” AMP. Part of that ruleset involved eschewing HTML elements like img and video in favour of web components like amp-img and amp-video.

That messaging changed over time. We were told that AMP is the collection of web components. If that’s the case, then I have no problem at all with AMP. People are free to use the components or not. And if the project produces performant accessible web components, then that’s great!

But right now it’s not at all clear which AMP people are talking about, even in the advisory committee. When we discuss improving AMP, do we mean the individual components or the set of rules that qualify an AMP page being “valid”?

The use-case for AMP-the-format (as opposed to AMP-the-library-of-components) was pretty clear. If you were a publisher and you wanted to appear in the top stories carousel in Google search, you had to publish using AMP. Just using the components wasn’t enough. Your pages had to be validated as AMP-the-format.

That’s no longer the case. From May, pages that are fast enough will qualify for the top stories carousel. What will publishers do then? Will they still maintain separate AMP-the-format pages? Time will tell.

I suspect publishers will ditch AMP-the-format, although it probably won’t happen overnight. I don’t think anyone likes being blackmailed by a search engine:

An engineer at a major news publication who asked not to be named because the publisher had not authorized an interview said Google’s size is what led publishers to use AMP.

The pre-rendering (along with the lightning bolt) that happens for AMP pages in Google search might be a reason for publishers to maintain their separate AMP-the-format pages. But I suspect publishers don’t actually think the benefits of pre-rendering outweigh the costs: pre-rendered AMP-the-format pages are served from Google’s servers with a Google URL. If anything, I think that publishers will look forward to having the best of both worlds—having their pages appear in the top stories carousel, but not having their pages hijacked by Google’s so-called-cache.

Does AMP-the-format even have a future without Google search propping it up? I hope not. I think it would make everything much clearer if AMP-the-format went away, leaving AMP-the-collection-of-components. We’d finally see these components being evaluated on their own merits—usefulness, performance, accessibility—without unfair interference.

So my role on the advisory committee so far has been to push for clarification on what we’re supposed to be advising on.

I think it’s good that I’m on the advisory committee, although I imagine my opinions could easily be be dismissed given my public record of dissent. I may well be fooling myself though, like those people who go to work at Facebook and try to justify it by saying they can accomplish more from inside than outside (or whatever else they tell themselves to sleep at night).

The topic I’ve volunteered to help with is somewhat existential in nature: what even is AMP? I’m happy to spend some time on that. I think it’ll be good for everyone to try to get that sorted, regardless about how you feel about the AMP project.

I have no intention of giving any of my unpaid labour towards the actual components themselves. I know AMP is theoretically open source now, but let’s face it, it’ll always be perceived as a Google-led project so Google can pay people to work on it.

That said, I’ve also recently joined a web components community group that Lea instigated. Remember she wrote that great blog post recently about the failed promise of web components? I’m not sure how much I can contribute to the group (maybe some meta-advice on the nature of good design principles?) but at the very least I can serve as a bridge between the community group and the AMP advisory committee.

After all, AMP is a collection of web components. Maybe.

As Antitrust Pressure Mounts, Google to Pull Back Benefit to News Sites That Adopted Its Preferred Mobile Technology – The Markup

More great reporting from Adrianne Jeffries at The Markup.

An engineer at a major news publication who asked not to be named because the publisher had not authorized an interview said Google’s size is what led publishers to use AMP.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Timing for bringing page experience to Google Search

Good news: as of May 2021, page speed (or core web vitals, if you must) will be a ranking factor in Google Search.

Even better news: at the same time, Google AMP will lose its unfairly privileged position in the top stories carousel. Hopefully this marks the beginning of the end for Google’s failed experiment in forcing publishers to use their tech.

I posted something recently that I think might be categorised as a “shitpost”:

Most single page apps are just giant carousels.

Extreme, yes, but perhaps there’s a nugget of truth to it. And it seemed to resonate:

I’ve never actually seen anybody justify SPA transitions with actual business data. They generally don’t seem to increase sales, conversion, or retention.

For some reason, for SPAs, managers are all of a sudden allowed to make purely emotional arguments: “it feels snappier”

If businesses were run rationally, when somebody asks for an order of magnitude increase in project complexity, the onus would be on them to prove that it proportionally improves business results.

But I’ve never actually seen that happen in a software business.

A single page app architecture makes a lot of sense for interaction-heavy sites with lots of state to maintain, like twitter.com. But I’ve seen plenty of sites built as single page apps even though there’s little to no interactivity or state management. For some people, it’s the default way of building anything on the web, even a brochureware site.

It seems like there’s a consensus that single page apps may have long initial loading times, but then they have quick transitions between “pages” …just like a carousel really. But I don’t know if that consensus is based on reality. Whether you’re loading a page of HTML or loading a chunk of JSON, you’re still making a network request that will take time to resolve.

The argument for loading a chunk of JSON is that you don’t have to make any requests for the associated CSS and JavaScript—they’re already loaded. Whereas if you request a page of HTML, that HTML will also request CSS and JavaScript.

Leaving aside the fact that is literally what the browser cache takes of, I’ve seen some circular reasoning around this:

1. We need to create a single page app because our assets, like our JavaScript dependencies, are so large.
2. Why are the JavaScript dependencies so large?
3. We need all that JavaScript to create the single page app functionlity.

To be fair, in the past, the experience of going from page to page used to feel a little herky-jerky, even if the response times were quick. You’d get a flash of a white blank page between navigations. But that’s no longer the case. Browsers now perform something called “paint holding” which elimates the herky-jerkiness.

So now if your pages are a reasonable size, there’s no practical difference in user experience between full page refreshes and single page app updates. Navigate around The Session if you want to see paint holding in action. Switching to a single page app architecture wouldn’t improve the user experience one jot.

Except…

If I were controlling everything with JavaScript, then I’d also have control over how to transition between the “pages” (or carousel items, if you prefer). There’s currently no way to do that with full page changes.

This is the problem that Jake set out to address in his proposal for navigation transitions a few years back:

Having to reimplement navigation for a simple transition is a bit much, often leading developers to use large frameworks where they could otherwise be avoided. This proposal provides a low-level way to create transitions while maintaining regular browser navigation.

I love this proposal. It focuses on user needs. It also asks why people reach for JavaScript frameworks instead of using what browsers provide. People reach for JavaScript frameworks because browsers don’t yet provide some functionality: components like tabs or accordions; DOM diffing; control over styling complex form elements; navigation transitions. The problems that JavaScript frameworks are solving today should be seen as the R&D departments for web standards of tomorrow. (And conversely, I strongly believe that the aim of any good JavaScript framework should be to make itself redundant.)

I linked to Jake’s excellent proposal in my shitpost saying:

bucketloads of JavaScript wouldn’t be needed if navigation transitions were available in browsers

But then I added—and I almost didn’t—this:

(not portals)

Now you might be asking yourself what Paul said out loud:

Excuse my ignorance but… WTF are portals!?

I replied with a link to the portals proposal and what I thought was an example use case:

Portals are a proposal from Google that would help their AMP use case (it would allow a web page to be pre-rendered, kind of like an iframe).

That was based on my reading of the proposal:

…show another page as an inset, and then activate it to perform a seamless transition to a new state, where the formerly-inset page becomes the top-level document.

It sounded like Google’s top stories carousel. And the proposal goes into a lot of detail around managing cross-origin requests. Again, that strikes me as something that would be more useful for a search engine than a single page app.

But Jake was not happy with my description. I didn’t intend to besmirch portals by mentioning Google AMP in the same sentence, but I can see how the transitive property of ickiness would apply. Because Google AMP is a nasty monopolistic project that harms the web and is an embarrassment to many open web advocates within Google, drawing any kind of comparison to AMP is kind of like Godwin’s Law for web stuff. I know that makes it sounds like I’m comparing Google AMP to Hitler, and just to be clear, I’m not (though I have myself been called a fascist by one of the lead engineers on AMP).

Clearly, emotions run high when Google AMP is involved. I regret summoning its demonic presence.

After chatting with Jake some more, I tried to find a better use case to describe portals. Reading the proposal, portals sound a lot like “spicy iframes”. So here’s a different use case that I ran past Jake: say you’re on a website that has an iframe embedded in it—like a YouTube video, for example. With portals, you’d have the ability to transition the iframe to a fully-fledged page smoothly.

But Jake told me that even though the proposal talks a lot about iframes and cross-origin security, portals are conceptually more like using rel="prerender" …but then having scripting control over how the pre-rendered page becomes the current page.

Put like that, portals sound more like Jake’s original navigation transitions proposal. But I have to say, I never would’ve understood that use case just from reading the portals proposal. I get that the proposal is aimed more at implementators than authors, but in its current form, it doesn’t seem to address the use case of single page apps.

Kenji said:

we haven’t seen interest from SPA folks in portals so far.

I’m not surprised! He goes on:

Maybe, they are happy / benefits aren’t clear yet.

From my own reading of the portals proposal, I think the benefits are definitely not clear. It’s almost like the opposite of Jake’s original proposal for navigation transitions. Whereas as that was grounded in user needs and real-world examples, the portals proposal seems to have jumped to the intricacies of implementation without covering the user needs.

Don’t get me wrong: if portals somehow end up leading to a solution more like Jake’s navigation transitions proposals, then I’m all for that. That’s the end result I care about. I’d love it if people had a lightweight option for getting the perceived benefits of single page apps without the costly overhead in performance that comes with JavaScripting all the things.

I guess the web I want includes giant carousels.