Accelerated Mobile Pages

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Accelerated Mobile Pages ( AMP , literally translated as accelerated mobile pages ) is a derivative of HTML specially developed for the creation of websites for mobile devices (especially smartphones ) . AMP was released in autumn 2015 by the AMP Project under the leadership of Google . Many HTML elements may not be used in AMP documents. However, since AMP supports several of its own element types, it is not a subset of HTML. The MIME type is, like other HTML documents, and the file extension. The opening element is also marked with the lightning symbol ⚡ ( Unicode : 0x26A1), so:text/html.htmlhtml<html ⚡>

Sense and purpose

Compared to websites optimized for mobile devices or websites developed by means of responsive design , AMP documents should be loaded significantly faster even via connections with low bandwidth and displayed in common web browsers for mobile devices in a shorter time using HTML rendering .

This is achieved by consistently streamlining the code on the pages. The technical standards include "AMP HTML", "AMP JS" and "Google AMP Cache". AMP HTML is an HTML that has been expanded to include some special AMP tags (for an overview, see:). AMP-JS is a JavaScript framework which causes all resources to be loaded asynchronously. Above all, the visible elements of a page are loaded first and then further "invisible" elements are loaded. In addition, Google offers the proxy-based content delivery network “AMP Cache”. AMP pages are optionally cached and optimized for performance so that they are served faster. This also enables a short version (snippet) of the AMP page to be displayed on the Google search results pages. Images are already scaled to the required size on the server side . In addition, content that cannot be immediately displayed on the screen is only requested when the user begins to scroll .

AMP takes a similar approach to Facebook Instant Articles and can be seen as Google's answer to it.

restrictions

The developer has to accept various restrictions compared to classic HTML:

  • Numerous common HTML elements are not permitted or have to be replaced with equivalents from the AMP fund.
  • Self-developed JavaScript is not allowed. A selection may only be made from a pool of scripts penned by the AMP project. In addition, the counting scripts of some web tracking systems are permitted.
  • Only a single central CSS format template is allowed, which must be embedded in the HEAD element of the HTML document. Inline CSS, i.e. using the style attribute of HTML elements, is also allowed. External CSS styles are not allowed with the exception of custom fonts.
  • Advertising banners may only be included by marketers who have been expressly approved for AMP. The banner formats are also fixed.
  • The websites are temporarily stored in a cache on Google's servers and sent from there to the users.

Search engine optimization

If you search for news topics with mobile devices, Google shows prominently placed news summaries in a news carousel. When called up, you will only receive messages from AMP sites. In the conventional search result display, the mere use of AMP is not a criterion for the order of hits. For mobile devices, on the other hand , the ranking is improved because AMP pages load quickly.

AMP articles can be recognized by a ⚡ . Google monitors compliance with the AMP guidelines and, if necessary, excludes pages from indexing or de-indexes them afterwards. In the Google Search Console , information about the indexing status and errors of AMP pages is provided under Display in the search → Accelerated Mobile Pages .

use

AMP is used by several companies or organizations.

In addition to Google, this also includes the search engine operators Bing and Baidu , social media such as B. Twitter and Pinterest as well as online trading platforms such as eBay and AliExpress .

Various manufacturers of content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress , Joomla and Drupal support AMP.

Several news websites such as Spiegel Online and Washington Post offer content that is edited in AMP.

AMP content that is delivered via Google's AMP cache contains a label indicating which provider it came from. Below the address bar of the web browser, which contains Google's web address, the user can identify the website name of the provider.

history

Announcement and launch

Google announced the AMP project on October 7, 2015. Discussions with partners of the European Digital News Initiative founded by Google and with other news publishers and technology companies took place beforehand. Initially, more than 30 news publishers and several technology companies (including Twitter , Pinterest , LinkedIn and WordPress ) were featured as participants in the AMP project. According to one of the co-founders of the AMP project, Malte Ubl, AMP was originally called PCU and stood for Portable Content Unit. Google first started showing AMP versions of web pages in mobile search results in February 2016. The AMP links in Google search have been marked with an icon.

Growth and expansion

In September 2016, Microsoft announced support for AMP in its Bing apps for iOS and Android.

In February 2017, a year after AMP was released, Adobe reported that AMP pages account for 7% of all web traffic for top publishers in the United States.

In June 2017, Twitter began linking to AMP pages through its iOS and Android apps.

In September 2018 Microsoft began introducing its own Bing AMP viewer and AMP cache.

As announced by AMP's technical manager Malte Ubl at AMP Conf '19, AMP no longer stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is now just AMP.

criticism

There has been multiple criticism of AMP.

The British IT news website The Register criticized that AMP harms information providers and users and only uses Google. As soon as false report providers use AMP, their content appeared more serious through distribution via Google's server.

Chris Coyier, a founder of CodePen, criticizes the fact that you don't visit a website but have a copy in Google's cache. He demands that the use of AMP should not improve the search engine ranking. The W3C AMP should also manage manufacturer-independent as a web standard.

John Gruber, the developer of the Markdown - markup language , emphasizes the AMP standard take site-party independence. AMP pages actually load quickly, but this is also possible with well-used HTML and CSS . He sees AMP as part of Google's plans to destroy the open web.

On Heise online , Herbert Braun emphasizes that the increasing complexity of many websites with many script programs increases loading times. Google's approach to load pages faster with AMP creates data protection problems, since websites are no longer accessed from decentralized servers, but from Google's servers. This gives Google connection data from users. In addition to user data, content is now also stored on Google. This ties both publishers and users closer to the Google universe.

Google can change policies for AMP at any time - without notice. For example, Google increased the minimum width for cover images of AMP articles from 696 to 1200 pixels. AMP pages that have not been updated can still be seen via the web search, but not in the news carousel.

See also

literature

  • Herbert Braun: Web Diet. In: c't 3/2016 (January 23, 2016), pp. 158–162.
  • Maximilian Geisler: An insight into Google's mobile AMPerium. In: Suchradar, issue 65 (April 26, 2017), pp. 38–43.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Building the future web, together. .
  2. ^ Björn Osterbrock: AMP: Accelerated Mobile Pages. March 8, 2016, accessed December 23, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Google: AMP Not A Ranking Signal Yet
  4. ^ Google Mobile First Index: Page Speed ​​Included as a Ranking Factor
  5. ↑ Malte Ubl: AMP Contributor Summit 2018 Keynote . The AMP Channel. Retrieved October 11, 2018.
  6. ↑ Bing App joins the AMP open-source effort (en) . In: Bing Webmaster Blog , September 23, 2016. 
  7. ↑ Google AMP: One Year Later | Adobe (en-US) . In: Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe , February 23, 2017. 
  8. ↑ Twitter ramps up AMP (en-US) . In: Search Engine Land , July 7, 2017. 
  9. ↑ Introducing Bing AMP viewer and Bing AMP cache (en) . In: Bing Webmaster Blog , September 19, 2018. 
  10. ↑ AMP Conf Keynote (en) . 19th April 2019. 
  11. ^ Scott Gilbertson: Kill Google AMP before it KILLS the web - Trust, independence, credibility - we've heard of those , The Register, May 19, 2017.
  12. ↑ Chris Coyier: Need to Catch Up on the AMP Debate? , CSS Tricks, March 22, 2017.
  13. ↑ John Gruber: Scott Gilbertson: 'Kill Google AMP before it kills the web' , Daring Fireball, May 20, 2017.
  14. ↑ Herbert Braun: Commentary on Google AMP: The golden cage , Heise online, March 17, 2017.
  15. ↑ Google Search - Article , developers.google.com, January 15, 2019.