AMP-The super speed.
What is it?
AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages project) was an open source project, and owned by technology giant Google.Inc, now the subsidiary of Alphabet. Later, collaboration by publishers and technology companies such as Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn made AMP very popular
In short, AMP is the technology to build static web pages that are rendered blazing fast.
AMP contains 3 main parts,yes I included Descriptions..
1.AMP HTML
2.AMP JS
3.Google AMP Cache
AMP HTML
“AMP HTML is used for building rich HTML pages by adding some extensions to the basic HTML. It also provides option to add AMP CSS in it to style the AMP pages. However, being a comparatively newer technology, and still being improved, some restrictions also exist for AMP right now, some of which I have explained below. ”
HTML tags in AMP uses custom tags. So, rendering of web pages become more smoother than ever.
In addition to this, it uses static content, so that it minimises the JavaScript usage. We know that JS blocks parallel downloads and increases page load time. So by minimizing use of JS, it helps pages to load much faster.
Most tags in an AMP HTML uses regular HTML tags, but some are AMP-specific tags ( such as amp-img, amp-style etc).
Another big feature is the support of various custom styles. You can includ it in your web pages by specifying them in the <style> tag. However, we cannot add external links like
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css">
AMP JS
AMP JS feature is included for loading resources like custom tags and improving performance. This can be achieved by including the CDN of AMP JS:
<script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>
This is the CDN to include AMP features:
Google AMP Cache
The Google AMP Cache is a proxy-based content delivery network for delivering all valid AMP documents. It fetches AMP HTML pages, caches them, and improves page performance automatically. When Google AMP Cache is enabled, the document and all its related JS and images will load from the same origin using HTTP 2.0, thereby achieving maximum efficiency.
Browsers such as Chrome, Mozilla, Safari, Opera etc. currently support AMP.
Thoughts:
Some of the things I noticed:
Open an AMP web page in mobile browser , shows URL as above:
- Every AMP web pages are cached in Google’s server. When a user requests a particular page from Google, it seems that it gives you the content straight from its own AMP CDN cached servers rather than the originally hosted server. (That is probably why, the URL is www.google.co.in/amp/{original-website-link}……., noticed that only chrome is doing this). I tried various browsers like Firefox and Opera, but the speed of loading content is slower than chrome. why? Answer is simple, they load the actual web page directly from the website server without any AMP or Google caching.
- Every AMP pages are loaded through an AMP route ( the ‘amp’ immediately after the google.com in the url google.com/amp/{website-link} ). I think they cache every AMP page over there and supply them whenever any user requests. How? Let’s try something out to understand this. Copy an AMP URL and paste it on to a notepad. Open CHROME browser and clear the cache. Then open the URL in CHROME browser directly without going via Google search. Interestingly, it will not give you the same speed as before. (ie. The same URL loads slower when typed directly into a browser thank clicking and opening it from the Google search results). This points out that when you search on Google, all AMP enabled data, related to the search are cached which is why it gives you the maximum speed.
I think AMP is the future for all content management web pages out there. It’s going to be the next BIG THING in web development. Content rich websites such as news, magazine, social blogs, social media sites etc will be most benefited from this. In future, more people will switch to mobile browser based news reading. Web pages may also going to get this super speed since they are on the development of AMP. They have promised to release full package within one year. Another notable thing is that Twitter has also plan to release instant articles next.
Happy coding! 🙌