Journal tags: google

When the web.dev team at Google contacted Clearleft about writing a course on responsive design, our eyes lit up.

This was clearly a good fit. For one thing, Clearleft has been pioneering responsive design from day one—we helped launch some of the first responsive sites in the UK. But there was another reason why this partnership sounded good: we had the same approach to writing and sharing.

Ever since Clearleft was founded in 2005 we’ve taken on board the motto of the World Wide Web itself: let’s share what we know. As well as doing the work, we enjoy sharing how the work gets done. Whether it’s case studies, blog posts, podcasts, or conference talks, we’re always thinking about ways to contribute to the web community.

Many other great resources have contributed to our collective knowledge: A List Apart, CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, Mozilla Developer Network, and more recently web.dev, which has become an excellent resource for front-end developers. But they wanted to make sure that designers were also included. Una described her plan for a fifteen-part course on modern responsive design aimed at web designers.

It was ambitious. The plan included some cutting edge technology that’s just shipping in browsers now. It sounded daunting and exciting in equal measure. Mostly it sounded like far too good an opportunity for Clearleft to pass up so we jumped on it.

With my fellow Clearlefties otherwise engaged in client work, it fell to me to tap out the actual words. Fortunately I’ve had plenty of experience with my own website of moving my fingers up and down on a keyboard in attempt to get concepts out of my head and onto the screen. I familiarised myself with the house style and got to work.

I had lots of help from the Chrome developer relations team at Google. Project management (thanks, Terry!), technical editing (thanks, Adam!), and copy editing (thanks, Rachel!) were provided to me.

Working with Rachel again was a real treat—she wrote the second edition of my book, HTML5 For Web Designers. Every time she suggested a change to something I had written, I found myself slapping my forehead and saying “Of course! That’s so much better!” It felt great to have someone else be a content buddy for me.

We had a weekly video call to check in and make sure everything was on track. There was also an epic spreadsheet to track the flow of each module as they progressed from outline to first draft to second draft.

Those were just the stages when the words were in a Google doc. After that, the content moved to Github and there was a whole other process to shepherd it towards going live.

Take note of the license in that repo: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. That means that you—or anyone—is free to use and reuse all the material (as long as you include a credit). I think I might republish the fifteen articles on my site at some point.

If you’d like to peruse the outcome of this collaboration between Clearleft and Google, head on over to web.dev and learn responsive design. Then feel free to share it!

1. Introduction
2. Media queries
3. Internationalization
4. Macro layouts
5. Micro layouts
6. Typography
7. Responsive images
8. The picture element
9. Icons
10. Theming
11. Accessibility
12. Interaction
13. User interface patterns
14. Media features
15. Screen configurations

I just finished watching The Billion Dollar Code, a German language miniseries on Netflix. It’s no Halt and Catch Fire, but it combines ’90s nostalgia, early web tech, and an opportunity for me to exercise my German comprehension.

It’s based on a true story, but with amalgamated characters. The plot, which centres around the preparation for a court case, inevitably invites comparison to The Social Network, although this time the viewpoint is from that of the underdogs trying to take on the incumbent. The incumbent is Google. The underdogs are ART+COM, artist-hackers who created the technology later used by Google Earth.

Early on, one of the characters says something about creating a one-to-one model of the whole world. That phrase struck me as familiar…

I remember being at the inaugural Future Of Web Apps conference in London back in 2006. Discussing the talks with friends afterwards, we all got a kick out of the speaker from Google, who happened to be German. His content and delivery was like a wonderfully Stranglovesque mad scientist. I’m sure I remember him saying something like “vee made a vun-to-vun model of the vurld.”

His name was Steffen Meschkat. I liveblogged the talk at the time. Turns out he was indeed on the team at ART+COM when they created Terravision, the technology later appropriated by Google (he ended up working at Google, which doesn’t make for as exciting a story as the TV show).

His 2006 talk was all about Ajax, something he was very familiar with, being on the Google Maps team. The Internet Archive even has a copy of the original audio!

It’s easy to forget now just how much hype there was around Ajax back then. It prompted me to write a book about combining Ajax and progressive enhancement.

These days, no one talks about Ajax. But that’s not because the technology went away. Quite the opposite. The technology became so ubiquituous that it no longer even needs a label.

A web developer today might ask “what’s Ajax?” in the same way that a fish might ask “what’s water?”

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.

I was moaning about Safari recently. Specifically I was moaning about the ridiculous way that browser updates are tied to operating system updates.

But I felt bad bashing Safari. It felt like a pile-on. That’s because a lot of people have been venting their frustrations with Safari recently:

• Jorge Arango wrote Back to the Bad Old Days of the Web,
• Dave Rupert wrote One-offs and low-expectations with Safari,
• Perry Sun wrote For developers, Apple’s Safari is crap and outdated, and
• Tim Perry wrote Safari isn’t protecting the web, it’s killing it.

I think it’s good that people share their frustrations with browsers openly, although I agree with Baldur Bjarnason that’s good to avoid Kremlinology and the motivational fallacy when blogging about Apple.

It’s also not helpful to make claims like “Safari is the new Internet Explorer!” Unless, that is, you can back up the claim.

On a recent episode of the HTTP 203 podcast, Jake and Surma set out to test the claim that Safari is the new IE. They did it by examining Safari according to a number of different measurements and comparing it to the olden days of Internet Explorer. The result is a really fascinating trip down memory lane along with a very nuanced and even-handed critique of Safari.

And the verdict? Well, you’ll just to have to listen to the podcast episode.

If you’d rather read the transcript, tough luck. That’s a real shame because, like I said, it’s an excellent and measured assessment. I’d love to add it to the links section of my site, but I can’t do that in good conscience while it’s inaccessible to the Deaf community.

When I started the Clearleft podcast, it was a no-brainer to have transcripts of every episode. Not only does it make the content more widely available, but it also makes it easier for people to copy and paste choice quotes.

Still, I get it. A small plucky little operation like Google isn’t going to have the deep pockets of a massive corporation like Clearleft. But if Jake and Surma were to open up a tip jar, I’d throw some money in to get HTTP 203 transcribed (I recommend getting Tina Pham to do it—she’s great!).

I apologise for my note of sarcasm there. But I share because I care. It really is an excellent discussion; one that everyone should be able to access.

Update: the bug with that episode of the HTTP 203 podcast has been fixed. Here’s the transcript! And all future episodes will have transcripts too:

Some folks called us out for lacking transcripts for our podcasts. Fair point! So, here we go (and all future episodes will have transcripts)https://t.co/HmfwBvAicA

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) August 18, 2021

After I jotted down some quick thoughts last week on the disastrous way that Google Chrome rolled out a breaking change, others have posted more measured and incisive takes:

• Chris Ferdinandi wrote Google vs. the web,
• Rich Harris wrote Stay alert,
• Chris Coyier wrote Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs, and
• Jim Nielsen wrote I Want To Confirm a Prompt That We Stay Alert

In fairness to Google, the Chrome team is receiving the brunt of the criticism because they were the first movers. Mozilla and Apple are on baord with making the same breaking change, but Google is taking the lead on this.

As I said in my piece, my issue was less to do with whether confirm(), prompt(), and alert() should be deprecated but more to do with how it was done, and the woeful lack of communication.

Thinking about it some more, I realised that what bothered me was the lack of an upgrade path. Considering that dialog is nowhere near ready for use, it seems awfully cart-before-horse-putting to first remove a feature and then figure out a replacement.

I was chatting to Amber recently and realised that there was a very different example of a feature being deprecated in web browsers…

We were talking about the KeyboardEvent.keycode property. Did you get the memo that it’s deprecated?

But fear not! You can use the KeyboardEvent.code property instead. It’s much nicer to use too. You don’t need to look up a table of numbers to figure out how to refer to a specific key on the keyboard—you use its actual value instead.

So the way that change was communicated was:

Hey, you really shouldn’t use the keycode property. Here’s a better alternative.

But with the more recently change, the communication was more like:

Hey, you really shouldn’t use confirm(), prompt(), or alert(). So go fuck yourself.

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 mentioned recently that there might be quite a difference in tone between my links and my journal here on my website:

’Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they’re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I’ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I’m excitedly pointing at something and saying “Check this out!” I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

My journal entries have been even more specifically negative of late. I’ve been bitchin’ and moanin’ about web browsers. But at least I’m an equal-opportunities bitcher and moaner.

• Mozilla, I complained about your Facebook Container extension for Firefox.
• Apple, I complained about the ridiculous way Safari’s update cycle is tied to operating system.
• Google, I complained about the way a breaking change was rolled out in Chrome (and the implications for future breaking changes).
• Microsoft, you got off lightly. But please consider any of my criticisms of Chrome to apply to Edge too, seeing as they’re basically the same now.

I wish my journal weren’t so negative, but my mithering behaviour has been been encouraged. On more than one occasion, someone I know at a browser company has taken me aside to let me know that I should blog about any complaints I might have with their browser. It sounds counterintuitive, I know. But these blog posts can give engineers some ammunition to get those issues prioritised and fixed.

So my message to you is this: if there’s something about a web browser that you’re not happy with (or, indeed, if there’s something you’re really happy with), take the time to write it down and publish it.

Publish it on your website. You could post your gripes on Twitter but whinging on Jack’s website is just pissing in the wind. And I suspect you also might put a bit more thought into a blog post on your own site.

I know it’s a cliché to say that browser makers want to hear from developers—and I’m often cynical about it myself—but they really do want to know what we think. Share your thoughts. I’ll probably end up linking to what you write.

There was quite a kerfuffle recently about a feature being removed from Google Chrome. To be honest, the details don’t really matter for the point I want to make, but for the record, this was about removing alert and confirm dialogs from cross-origin iframes (and eventually everywhere else too).

It’s always tricky to remove a long-established feature from web browsers, but in this case there were significant security and performance reasons. The problem was how the change was communicated. It kind of wasn’t. So the first that people found out about it about was when things suddenly stopped working (like CodePen embeds).

The Chrome team responded quickly and the change has now been pushed back to next year. Hopefully there will be significant communication before that to let site owners know about the upcoming breakage.

So all’s well that ends well and we’ve all learned a valuable lesson about the importance of communication.

Or have we?

While this was going on, Emily Stark tweeted a more general point about breakage on the web:

Breaking changes happen often on the web, and as a developer it’s good practice to test against early release channels of major browsers to learn about any compatibility issues upfront.

Yikes! To me, this appears wrong on almost every level.

First of all, breaking changes don’t happen often on the web. They are—and should be—rare. If that were to change, the web would suffer massively in terms of predictability.

Secondly, the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.

I wasn’t the only one surprised by this message.

Simon says:

No, no, no, no! One of the best things about developing for the web is that, as a rule, browsers don’t break old code. Expecting every website and application to have an active team of developers maintaining it at all times is not how the web should work!

Edward Faulkner:

Most organizations and individuals do not have the resources to properly test and debug their website against Chrome canary every six weeks. Anybody who published a spec-compliant website should be able to trust that it will keep working.

Evan You:

This statement seriously undermines my trust in Google as steward for the web platform. When did we go from “never break the web” to “yes we will break the web often and you should be prepared for it”?!

It’s worth pointing out that the original tweet was not an official Google announcement. As Emily says right there on her Twitter account:

Opinions are my own.

Still, I was shaken to see such a cavalier attitude towards breaking changes on the World Wide Web. I know that removing dangerous old features is inevitable, but it should also be exceptional. It should not be taken lightly, and it should certainly not be expected to be an everyday part of web development.

It’s almost miraculous that I can visit the first web page ever published in a modern web browser and it still works. Let’s not become desensitised to how magical that is. I know it’s hard work to push the web forward, constantly add new features, while also maintaining backward compatibility, but it sure is worth it! We have collectively banked three decades worth of trust in the web as a stable place to build a home. Let’s not blow it.

If you published a website ten or twenty years ago, and you didn’t use any proprietary technology but only stuck to web standards, you should rightly expect that site to still work today …and still work ten and twenty years from now.

There was something else that bothered me about that tweet and it’s not something that I saw mentioned in the responses. There was an unspoken assumption that the web is built by professional web developers. That gave me a cold chill.

The web has made great strides in providing more and more powerful features that can be wielded in learnable, declarative, forgiving languages like HTML and CSS. With a bit of learning, anyone can make web pages complete with form validation, lazily-loaded responsive images, and beautiful grids that kick in on larger screens. The barrier to entry for all of those features has lowered over time—they used to require JavaScript or complex hacks. And with free(!) services like Netlify, you could literally drag a folder of web pages from your computer into a browser window and boom!, you’ve published to the entire world.

But the common narrative in the web development community—and amongst browser makers too apparently—is that web development has become more complex; so complex, in fact, that only an elite priesthood are capable of making websites today.

Absolute bollocks.

You can choose to make it really complicated. Convince yourself that “the modern web” is inherently complex and convoluted. But then look at what makes it complex and convoluted: toolchains, build tools, pipelines, frameworks, libraries, and abstractions. Please try to remember that none of those things are required to make a website.

This is for everyone. Not just for everyone to consume, but for everyone to make.

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.

I’ve always liked the way that web browsers are called “user agents” in the world of web standards. It’s such a succinct summation of what browsers are for, or more accurately who browsers are for. Users.

The term makes sense when you consider that the internet is for end users. That’s not to be taken for granted. This assertion is now enshrined in the Internet Engineering Task Force’s RFC 8890—like Magna Carta for the network age. It’s also a great example of prioritisation in a design principle:

When there is a conflict between the interests of end users of the Internet and other parties, IETF decisions should favor end users.

So when a web browser—ostensibly an agent for the user—prioritises user-hostile third parties, we get upset.

Google Chrome—ostensibly an agent for the user—is running an origin trial for Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). This is not a technology that serves the end user. It is a technology that serves third parties who want to target end users. The most common use case is behavioural advertising, but targetting could be applied for more nefarious purposes.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote an explainer last month: Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know.

Let’s back up a minute and look at why this is happening. End users are routinely targeted today (for behavioural advertising and other use cases) through third-party cookies. Some user agents like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox are stamping down on this, disabling third party cookies by default.

Seeing which way the wind is blowing, Google’s Chrome browser will also disable third-party cookies at some time in the future (they’re waiting to shut that barn door until the fire is good’n’raging). But Google isn’t just in the browser business. Google is also in the ad tech business. So they still want to advertisers to be able to target end users.

Yes, this is quite the cognitive dissonance: one part of the business is building a user agent while a different part of the company is working on ways of tracking end users. It’s almost as if one company shouldn’t simultaneously be the market leader in three separate industries: search, advertising, and web browsing. (Seriously though, I honestly think Google’s search engine would get better if it were split off from the parent company, and I think that Google’s web browser would also get better if it were a separate enterprise.)

Anyway, one possible way of tracking users without technically tracking individual users is to assign them to buckets, or cohorts of interest based on their browsing habits. Does that make you feel safer? Me neither.

That’s what Google is testing with the origin trial of FLoC.

If you, as an end user, don’t wish to be experimented on like this, there are a few things you can do:

• Don’t use Chrome. No other web browser is participating in this experiment. I recommend Firefox.
• If you want to continue to use Chrome, install the Duck Duck Go Chrome extension.
• Alternatively, if you manually disable third-party cookies, your Chrome browser won’t be included in the experiment.
• Or you could move to Europe. The origin trial won’t be enabled for users in the European Union, which is coincidentally where GDPR applies.

That last decision is interesting. On the one hand, the origin trial is supposed to be on a small scale, hence the lack of European countries. On the other hand, the origin trial is “opt out” instead of “opt in” so that they can gather a big enough data set. Weird.

The plan is that if and when FLoC launches, websites would have to opt in to it. And when I say “plan”, I mean “best guess.”

I, for one, am filled with confidence that Google would never pull a bait-and-switch with their technologies.

In the meantime, if you’re a website owner, you have to opt your website out of the origin trial. You can do this by sending a server header. A meta element won’t do the trick, I’m afraid.

I’ve done it for my sites, which are served using Apache. I’ve got this in my .conf file:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header always set Permissions-Policy "interest-cohort=()"
</IfModule>

If you don’t have access to your server, tough luck. But if your site runs on Wordpress, there’s a proposal to opt out of FLoC by default.

Interestingly, none of the Chrome devs that I follow are saying anything about FLoC. They’re usually quite chatty about proposals for potential standards, but I suspect that this one might be embarrassing for them. It was a similar situation with AMP. In that case, Google abused its monopoly position in search to blackmail publishers into using Google’s format. Now Google’s monopoly in advertising is compromising the integrity of its browser. In both cases, it makes it hard for Chrome devs claiming to have the web’s best interests at heart.

But one of the advantages of having a huge share of the browser market is that Chrome can just plough ahead and unilaterily implement whatever it wants even if there’s no consensus from other browser makers. So that’s what Google is doing with FLoC. But their justification for doing this doesn’t really work unless other browsers play along.

Here’s Google’s logic:

1. Third-party cookies are on their way out so advertisers will no longer be able to use that technology to target users.
2. If we don’t provide an alternative, advertisers and other third parties will use fingerprinting, which we all agree is very bad.
3. So let’s implement Federated Learning of Cohorts so that advertisers won’t use fingerprinting.

The problem is with step three. The theory is that if FLoC gives third parties what they need, then they won’t reach for fingerprinting. Even if there were any validity to that hypothesis, the only chance it has of working is if every browser joins in with FLoC. Otherwise ad tech companies are leaving money on the table. Can you seriously imagine third parties deciding that they just won’t target iPhone or iPad users any more? Remember that Safari is the only real browser on iOS so unless FLoC is implemented by Apple, third parties can’t reach those people …unless those third parties use fingerprinting instead.

Google have set up a situation where it looks like FLoC is going head-to-head with fingerprinting. But if FLoC becomes a reality, it won’t be instead of fingerprinting, it will be in addition to fingerprinting.

Google is quite right to point out that fingerprinting is A Very Bad Thing. But their concerns about fingerprinting sound very hollow when you see that Chrome is pushing ahead and implementing a raft of browser APIs that other browser makers quite rightly point out enable more fingerprinting: Battery Status, Proximity Sensor, Ambient Light Sensor and so on.

When it comes to those APIs, the message from Google is that fingerprinting is a solveable problem.

But when it comes to third party tracking, the message from Google is that fingerprinting is inevitable and so we must provide an alternative.

Which one is it?

Google’s flimsy logic for why FLoC is supposedly good for end users just doesn’t hold up. If they were honest and said that it’s to maintain the status quo of the ad tech industry, it would make much more sense.

The flaw in Google’s reasoning is the fundamental idea that tracking is necessary for advertising. That’s simply not true. Sacrificing user privacy is fundamental to behavioural advertising …but behavioural advertising is not the only kind of advertising. It isn’t even a very good kind of advertising.

Marko Saric sums it up:

FLoC seems to be Google’s way of saving a dying business. They are trying to keep targeted ads going by making them more “privacy-friendly” and “anonymous”. But behavioral profiling and targeted advertisement is not compatible with a privacy-respecting web.

What’s striking is that the very monopolies that make Google and Facebook the leaders in behavioural advertising would also make them the leaders in contextual advertising. Almost everyone uses Google’s search engine. Almost everyone uses Facebook’s social network. An advertising model based on what you’re currently looking at would keep Google and Facebook in their dominant positions.

Google made their first many billions exclusively on contextual advertising. Google now prefers to push the message that behavioral advertising based on personal data collection is superior but there is simply no trustworthy evidence to that.

I sincerely hope that Chrome will align with Safari, Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, Edge and every other web browser. Everyone already agrees that fingerprinting is the real enemy. Imagine the combined brainpower that could be brought to bear on that problem if all browsers made user privacy a priority.

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

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.)

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.

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.

If you’re using web fonts, there are good performance (and privacy) reasons for hosting your own font files. And fortunately, Google Fonts gives you that option. There’s a “Download family” button on every specimen page.

But if you go ahead and download a font family from Google Fonts, you’ll notice something a bit odd. The .zip file only contains .ttf files. You can serve those on the web, but it’s far from the best choice. Woff2 is far leaner in file size.

This means you need to manually convert the downloaded .ttf files into .woff or .woff2 files using something like Font Squirrel’s generator. That’s fine, but I’m curious as to why this step is necessary. Why doesn’t Google Fonts provide .woff or .woff2 files in the downloaded folder? After all, if you choose to use Google Fonts as a third-party hosting service for your fonts, it most definitely serves up the appropriate file formats.

I thought maybe it was something to do with the licensing. Maybe some licenses only allow for unmodified truetype files to be distributed? But I’ve looked at fonts with different licenses—some have Apache 2 licensing, some have Open Font licensing—and they’re all quite permissive and definitely allow for modification.

Maybe the thinking is that, if you’re hosting your own font files, then you know what you’re doing and you should be able to do your own file conversion and subsetting. But I’ve come across more than one website in the wild serving up .ttf files. And who can blame them? They want to host their own font files. They downloaded those files from Google Fonts. Why shouldn’t they assume that they’re good to go?

It’s all a bit strange. If anyone knows why Google Fonts only provides .ttf files for download, please let me know. In a pinch, I will also accept rampant speculation.

Trys also pointed out some weird default behaviour if you do let Google Fonts do the hosting for you. Specifically if it’s a variable font. Let’s say it’s a font with weight as a variable axis. You specify in advance which weights you’ll be using, and then it generates separate font files to serve for each different weight.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of using a variable font? I mean, I can see how it could result in smaller file sizes if you’re just using one or two weights, but isn’t half the fun of having a weight axis that you can go crazy with as many weights as you want and it’s all still one font file?

Like I said, it’s all very strange.

The latest newsletter from The History Of The Web is a good one: The Browser Engine That Could. It’s all about the history of browsers and more specifically, rendering engines.

Jay quotes from a 1992 email by Tim Berners-Lee when there was real concern about having too many different browsers. But as history played out, the concern shifted to having too few different browsers.

I wrote about this—back when Edge switched to using Chromium—in a post called Unity where I compared it to political parties:

If you have hundreds of different political parties, that’s not ideal. But if you only have one political party, that’s very bad indeed!

I talked about this some more with Brian and Stuart on the Igalia Chats podcast: Web Ecosystem Health (here’s the mp3 file).

In the discussion we dive deeper into the naunces of browser engine diversity; how it’s not the numbers that matter, but representation. The danger with one dominant rendering engine is that it would reflect one dominant set of priorities.

I think we’re starting to see this kind of battle between different sets of priorities playing out in the browser rendering engine landscape.

Webkit published a list of APIs they won’t be implementing in their current form because of security concerns around fingerprinting. Mozilla is taking the same stand. Google is much more gung-ho about implementing those APIs.

I think it’s safe to say that every implementor wants to ship powerful APIs and ensure security and privacy. The issue is with which gets priority. Using the language of principles and priorities, you could crudely encapsulate Apple and Mozilla’s position as:

Privacy, even over capability.

That design principle would pass the reversibility test. In fact, Google’s position might be represented as:

Capability, even over privacy.

I’m not saying Apple and Mozilla don’t value powerful APIs. I’m not saying Google doesn’t value privacy. I’m saying that Google’s priorities are different to Apple’s and Mozilla’s.

Alas, Alex is saying that Apple and Mozilla don’t value capability:

There is a contingent of browser vendors today who do not wish to expand the web platform to cover adjacent use-cases or meaningfully close the relevance gap that the shift to mobile has opened.

That’s very disappointing. It’s a cheap shot. As cheap as saying that, given Google’s business model, Chrome wouldn’t want to expand the web platform to provide better privacy and security.

I have a proposal that I think might alleviate some of the animosity around Google AMP. You can jump straight to the proposal or get some of the back story first…

The AMP format

Google AMP is exactly the kind of framework I’d like to get behind. Unlike most front-end frameworks, its components take a declarative approach—no knowledge of JavaScript required. I think Lea’s excellent Mavo is the only other major framework that takes this inclusive approach. All the configuration happens in markup, and all the styling happens in CSS. Excellent!

But I cannot get behind AMP.

Instead of competing on its own merits, AMP is unfairly propped up by the search engine of its parent company, Google. That makes it very hard to evaluate whether AMP is being used on its own merits. Instead, the evidence suggests that most publishers of AMP pages are doing so because they feel they have to, rather than because they want to. That’s a real shame, because as a library of web components, AMP seems pretty good. But there’s just no way to evaluate AMP-the-format without taking into account AMP-the-ecosystem.

The AMP ecosystem

Google AMP ostensibly exists to make the web faster. Initially the focus was specifically on mobile performance, but that distinction has since fallen by the wayside. The idea is that by using AMP’s web components, your pages will be speedy. Though, as Andy Davies points out, this isn’t always the case:

This is where I get confused… https://independent.co.uk only have an AMP site yet it’s performance is awful from a user perspective - isn’t AMP supposed to prevent this?

See also: Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there’s no choice but to use it:

According to Google’s own Page Speed Insights audit (which Google recommends to check your performance), the AMP version of articles got an average performance score of 87. The non-AMP versions? 95.

Publishers who already have fast web pages—like The Guardian—are still compelled to make AMP versions of their stories because of the search benefits reserved for AMP. As Terence Eden reported from a meeting of the AMP advisory committee:

We heard, several times, that publishers don’t like AMP. They feel forced to use it because otherwise they don’t get into Google’s news carousel — right at the top of the search results.

Some people felt aggrieved that all the hard work they’d done to speed up their sites was for nothing.

The Google AMP team are at pains to point out that AMP is not a ranking factor in search. That’s true. But it is unfairly privileged in other ways. Only AMP pages can appear in the Top Stories carousel …which appears above any other search results. As I’ve said before:

Now, if you were to ask any right-thinking person whether they think having their page appear right at the top of a list of search results would be considered preferential treatment, I think they would say hell, yes! This is the only reason why The Guardian, for instance, even have AMP versions of their content—it’s not for the performance benefits (their non-AMP pages are faster); it’s for that prime real estate in the carousel.

From A letter about Google AMP:

Content that “opts in” to AMP and the associated hosting within Google’s domain is granted preferential search promotion, including (for news articles) a position above all other results.

That’s not the only way that AMP pages get preferential treatment. It turns out that the secret to the speed of AMP pages isn’t the web components. It’s the prerendering.

The AMP cache

If you’ve ever seen an AMP page in a list of search results, you’ll have noticed the little lightning icon. If you’ve ever tapped on that search result, you’ll have noticed that the page loads blazingly fast!

That’s not down to AMP-the-format, alas. That’s down to the fact that the page has been prerendered by Google before you even went to it. If any page were prerendered that way, it would load blazingly fast. But currently, this privilege is reserved for AMP pages only.

If, after tapping through to that AMP page, you looked at the address bar of your browser, you might have noticed something odd. Even though you might have thought you were visiting The Washington Post, or The New York Times, the URL of the (blazingly fast) page you’re looking at is still under Google’s domain. That’s because Google hosts any AMP pages that it prerenders.

Google calls this “the AMP cache”, but it would be better described as “AMP hosting”. The web page sent down the wire is hosted on Google’s domain.

Here’s that AMP letter again:

When a user navigates from Google to a piece of content Google has recommended, they are, unwittingly, remaining within Google’s ecosystem.

Through gritted teeth, I will refer to this as “the AMP cache”, because that’s what everyone else calls it. But make no mistake, Google is hosting—not caching—these pages.

But why host the pages on a Google domain? Why not prerender the original URLs?

Prerendering and privacy

Scott summed up the situation with AMP nicely:

The pitch I think site owners are hearing is: let us host your pages on our domain and we’ll promote them in search results AND preload them so they feel “instant.” To opt-in, build pages using this component syntax.

But perhaps we could de-couple the AMP format from the AMP cache.

That’s what Terence suggests:

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

The AMP letter, too:

Instead of granting premium placement in search results only to AMP, provide the same perks to all pages that meet an objective, neutral performance criterion such as Speed Index.

Scott reiterates:

It’s been said before but it would be so good for the web if pages with a Lighthouse score over say, 90 could get into that top search result area, even if they’re not built using Google’s AMP framework. Feels wrong to have to rebuild/reproduce an already-fast site just for SEO.

This was also what I was calling for. But then Malte pointed out something that stumped me. Privacy.

Here’s the problem…

Let’s say Google do indeed prerender already-fast pages when they’re listed in search results. You, a search user, type something into Google. A list of results come back. Google begins pre-rendering some of them. But you don’t end up clicking through to those pages. Nonetheless, the servers those pages are hosted on have received a GET request coming from a Google search. Those publishers now know that a particular (cookied?) user could have clicked through to their site. That’s very different from knowing when someone has actually arrived at a particular site.

And that’s why Google host all the AMP pages that they prerender. Given the privacy implications of prerendering non-Google URLs, I must admit that I see their point.

Still, it’s a real shame to miss out on the speed benefit of prerendering:

Prerendering AMP documents leads to substantial improvements in page load times. Page load time can be measured in different ways, but they consistently show that prerendering lets users see the content they want faster. For now, only AMP can provide the privacy preserving prerendering needed for this speed benefit.

A modest proposal

Why is Google’s AMP cache just for AMP pages? (Y’know, apart from the obvious answer that it’s in the name.)

What if Google were allowed to host non-AMP pages? Google search could then prerender those pages just like it currently does for AMP pages. There would be no privacy leaks; everything would happen on the same domain—google.com or ampproject.org or whatever—just as currently happens with AMP pages.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting that Google should make a 1:1 model of the web just to prerender search results. I think that the implementation would need to have two important requirements:

1. Hosting needs to be opt-in.
2. Only fast pages should be prerendered.

Opting in

Currently, by publishing a page using the AMP format, publishers give implicit approval to Google to host that page on Google’s servers and serve up this Google-hosted version from search results. This has always struck me as being legally iffy. I’ve looked in the AMP documentation to try to find any explicit granting of hosting permission (e.g. “By linking to this JavaScript file, you hereby give Google the right to serve up our copies of your content.”), but no luck. So even with the current situation, I think a clear opt-in for hosting would be beneficial.

This could be a meta element. Maybe something like:

<meta name="caches-allowed" content="google">

This would have the nice benefit of allowing comma-separated values:

<meta name="caches-allowed" content="google, yandex">

(The name is just a strawman, by the way—I’m not suggesting that this is what the final implementation would actually look like.)

If not a meta element, then perhaps this could be part of robots.txt? Although my feeling is that this needs to happen on a document-by-document basis rather than site-wide.

Many people will, quite rightly, never want Google—or anyone else—to host and serve up their content. That’s why it’s so important that this behaviour needs to be opt-in. It’s kind of appalling that the current hosting of AMP pages is opt-in-by-proxy-sort-of.

Criteria for prerendering

Which pages should be blessed with hosting and prerendering? The fast ones. That’s sorta the whole point of AMP. But right now, there’s a lot of resentment by people with already-fast websites who quite rightly feel they shouldn’t have to use the AMP format to benefit from the AMP ecosystem.

Page speed is already a ranking factor. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to extend its benefits to hosting and prerendering. As mentioned above, there are already a few possible metrics to use:

• Page Speed Index
• Lighthouse
• Web Page Test

Ah, but what if a page has good score when it’s indexed, but then gets worse afterwards? Not a problem! The version of the page that’s measured is the same version of the page that gets hosted and prerendered. Google can confidently say “This page is fast!” After all, they’re the ones serving up the page.

That does raise the question of how often Google should check back with the original URL to see if it has changed/worsened/improved. The answer to that question is however long it currently takes to check back in on AMP pages:

Each time a user accesses AMP content from the cache, the content is automatically updated, and the updated version is served to the next user once the content has been cached.

Issues

This proposal does not solve the problem with the address bar. You’d still find yourself looking at a page from The Washington Post or The New York Times (or adactio.com) but seeing a completely different URL in your browser. That’s not good, for all the reasons outlined in the AMP letter.

In fact, this proposal could potentially make the situation worse. It would allow even more sites to be impersonated by Google’s URLs. Where currently only AMP pages are bad actors in terms of URL confusion, opening up the AMP cache would allow equal opportunity URL confusion.

What I’m suggesting is definitely not a long-term solution. The long-term solutions currently being investigated are technically tricky and will take quite a while to come to fruition—web packages and signed exchanges. In the meantime, what I’m proposing is a stopgap solution that’s technically a lot simpler. But it won’t solve all the problems with AMP.

This proposal solves one problem—AMP pages being unfairly privileged in search results—but does nothing to solve the other, perhaps more serious problem: the erosion of site identity.

Measuring

Currently, Google can assess whether a page should be hosted and prerendered by checking to see if it’s a valid AMP page. That test would need to be widened to include a different measurement of performance, but those measurements already exist.

I can see how this assessment might not be as quick as checking for AMP validity. That might affect whether non-AMP pages could be measured quickly enough to end up in the Top Stories carousel, which is, by its nature, time-sensitive. But search results are not necessarily as time-sensitive. Let’s start there.

Assets

Currently, AMP pages can be prerendered without fetching anything other than the markup of the AMP page itself. All the CSS is inline. There are no initial requests for other kinds of content like images. That’s because there are no img elements on the page: authors must use amp-img instead. The image itself isn’t loaded until the user is on the page.

If the AMP cache were to be opened up to non-AMP pages, then any content required for prerendering would also need to be hosted on that same domain. Otherwise, there’s privacy leakage.

This definitely introduces an extra level of complexity. Paths to assets within the markup might need to be re-written to point to the Google-hosted equivalents. There would almost certainly need to be a limit on the number of assets allowed. Though, for performance, that’s no bad thing.

Make no mistake, figuring out what to do about assets—style sheets, scripts, and images—is very challenging indeed. Luckily, there are very smart people on the Google AMP team. If that brainpower were to focus on this problem, I am confident they could solve it.

Summary

1. Prerendering of non-Google URLs is problematic for privacy reasons, so Google needs to be able to host pages in order to prerender them.
2. Currently, that’s only done for pages using the AMP format.
3. The AMP cache—and with it, prerendering—should be decoupled from the AMP format, and opened up to other fast web pages.

There will be technical challenges, but hopefully nothing insurmountable.

I honestly can’t see what Google have to lose here. If their goal is genuinely to reward fast pages, then opening up their AMP cache to fast non-AMP pages will actively encourage people to make fast web pages (without having to switch over to the AMP format).

I’ve deliberately kept the details vague—what the opt-in should look like; what the speed measurement should be; how to handle assets—I’m sure smarter folks than me can figure that stuff out.

I would really like to know what other people think about this proposal. Obviously, I’d love to hear from members of the Google AMP team. But I’d also love to hear from publishers. And I’d very much like to know what people in the web performance community think about this. (Write a blog post and send me a webmention.)

What am I missing here? What haven’t I thought of? What are the potential pitfalls (and are they any worse than the current acrimonious situation with Google AMP)?

I would really love it if someone with a fast website were in a position to say, “Hey Google, I’m giving you permission to host this page so that it can be prerendered.”

I would really love it if someone with a slow website could say, “Oh, shit! We’d better make our existing website faster or Google won’t host our pages for prerendering.”

And I would dearly love to finally be able to embrace AMP-the-format with a clear conscience. But as long as prerendering is joined at the hip to the AMP format, the injustice of the situation only harms the AMP project.

Google, open up the AMP cache.

Shockwaves rippled across the web standards community recently when it appeared that Google Chrome was unilaterally implementing a new element called toast. It turns out that’s not the case, but the confusion is understandable.

First off, this all kicked off with the announcement of “intent to implement”. That makes it sounds like Google are intending to, well, …implement this. In fact “intent to implement” really means “intend to mess around with this behind a flag”. The language is definitely confusing and this is something that will hopefully be addressed.

Secondly, Chrome isn’t going to ship a toast element. Instead, this is a proposal for a custom element currently called std-toast. I’m assuming that should the experiment prove successful, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the final element name will be called toast (minus the sexually-transmitted-disease prefix). If this turns out to be a useful feature, there will surely be a discussion between implementators about the naming of the finished element.

This is the ideal candidate for a web component. It makes total sense to create a custom element along the lines of std-toast. At first I was confused about why this was happening inside of a browser instead of first being created as a standalone web component, but it turns out that there’s been a fair bit of research looking at existing implementations in libraries and web components. So this actually looks like a good example of paving an existing cowpath.

But it didn’t come across that way. The timing of announcements felt like this was something that was happening without prior discussion. Terence Eden writes:

It feels like a Google-designed, Google-approved, Google-benefiting idea which has been dumped onto the Web without any consideration for others.

I know that isn’t the case. And I know how many dedicated people have worked hard on this proposal.

Adrian Roselli also remarks on the optics of this situation:

To be clear, while I think there is value in minting a native HTML element to fill a defined gap, I am wary of the approach Google has taken. A repo from a new-to-the-industry Googler getting a lot of promotion from Googlers, with Googlers on social media doing damage control for the blowback, WHATWG Googlers handling questions on the repo, and Google AMP strongly supporting it (to reduce its own footprint), all add up to raise alarm bells with those who advocated for a community-driven, needs-based, accessible web.

Dave Cramer made a similar point:

But my concern wasn’t so much about the nature of the new elements, but of how we learned about them and what that says about how web standardization works.

So there’s a general feeling (outside of Google) that there’s something screwy here about the order of events. A lot discussion and research seems to have happened in isolation before announcing the intent to implement:

It does not appear that any discussions happened with other browser vendors or standards bodies before the intent to implement.

Why is this a problem? Google is seeking feedback on a solution, not on how to solve the problem.

Going back to my early confusion about putting a web component directly into a browser, this question on Discourse echoes my initial reaction:

Why not release std-toast (and other elements in development) as libraries first?

It turns out that std-toast and other in-browser web components are part of an idea called layered APIs. In theory this is an initiative in the spirit of the extensible web manifesto.

The extensible web movement focused on exposing low-level APIs to developers: the fetch API, the cache API, custom elements, Houdini, and all of those other building blocks. Layered APIs, on the other hand, focuses on high-level features …like, say, an HTML element for displaying “toast” notifications.

Layered APIs is an interesting idea, but I’m worried that it could be used to circumvent discussion between implementers. It’s a route to unilaterally creating new browser features first and standardising after the fact. I know that’s how many features already end up in browsers, but I think that the sooner that authors, implementers, and standards bodies get a say, the better.

I certainly don’t think this is a good look for Google given the debacle of AMP’s “my way or the highway” rollout. I know that’s a completely different team, but the external perception of Google amongst developers has been damaged by the AMP project’s anti-competitive abuse of Google’s power in search.

Right now, a lot of people are jumpy about Microsoft’s move to Chromium for Edge. My friends at Microsoft have been reassuring me that while it’s always a shame to reduce browser engine diversity, this could actually be a good thing for the standards process: Microsoft could theoretically keep Google in check when it comes to what features are introduced to the Chromium engine.

But that only works if there is some kind of standards process. Layered APIs in general—and std-toast in particular—hint at a future where a single browser vendor can plough ahead on their own. I sincerely hope that’s a misreading of the situation and that this has all been an exercise in miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Like Dave Cramer says:

I hear a lot about how anyone can contribute to the web platform. We’ve all heard the preaching about incubation, the Extensible Web, working in public, paving the cowpaths, and so on. But to an outside observer this feels like Google making all the decisions, in private, and then asking for public comment after the feature has been designed.

You know what I like? Print stylesheets!

I mean, I’m not a huge fan of trying to get the damn things to work consistently—thanks, browsers—but I love the fact that they exist (athough I’ve come across a worrying number of web developers who weren’t aware of their existence). Print stylesheets are one more example of the assumption-puncturing nature of the web: don’t assume that everyone will be reading your content on a screen. News articles, blog posts, recipes, lyrics …there are many situations where a well-considered print stylesheet can make all the difference to the overall experience.

You know what I don’t like? QR codes!

It’s not because they’re ugly, or because they’ve been over-used by the advertising industry in completely inapropriate ways. No, I don’t like QR codes because they aren’t an open standard. Still, I must grudgingly admit that they’re a convenient way of providing a shortcut to a URL (albeit a completely opaque one—you never know if it’s actually going to take you to the URL it promises or to a Rick Astley video). And now that the parsing of QR codes is built into iOS without the need for any additional application, the barrier to usage is lower than ever.

So much as I might grit my teeth, QR codes and print stylesheets make for good bedfellows.

I picked up a handy tip from a Smashing Magazine article about print stylesheets a few years back. You can the combination of a @media print and generated content to provide a QR code for the URL of the page being printed out. Google’s Chart API provides a really handy shortcut for generating QR codes:

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150&chl=http://example.com

Except that there’s no telling how long that will continue to work. Google being Google, they’ve deprecated the simple image chart API in favour of the over-engineered JavaScript alternative. So just as I recently had to migrate all my maps over to Leaflet when Google changed their Maps API from under the feet of developers, the clock is ticking on when I’ll have to find an alternative to the Image Charts API.

For now, I’ve got the QR code generation happening on The Session for individual discussions, events, recordings, sessions, and tunes. For the tunes, there’s also a separate URL for each setting of a tune, specifically for printing out. I’ve added a QR code there too.

I’ve been thinking about another potential use for QR codes. I’m preparing a new talk for An Event Apart Seattle. The talk is going to be quite practical—for a change—and I’m going to be encouraging people to visit some URLs. It might be fun to include the biggest possible QR code on a slide.

I’d better generate the images before Google shuts down that API.

Microsoft’s Edge browser is going to switch its rendering engine over to Chromium.

I am deflated and disappointed.

There’s just no sugar-coating this. I’m sure the decision makes sound business sense for Microsoft, but it’s not good for the health of the web.

Very soon, the vast majority of browsers will have an engine that’s either Blink or its cousin, WebKit. That may seem like good news for developers when it comes to testing, but trust me, it’s a sucky situation of innovation and agreement. Instead of a diverse browser ecosystem, we’re going to end up with incest and inbreeding.

There’s one shining exception though. Firefox. That browser was originally created to combat the seemingly unstoppable monopolistic power of Internet Explorer. Now that Microsoft are no longer in the rendering engine game, Firefox is once again the only thing standing in the way of a complete monopoly.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of the web we want.

Jeffrey wrote that browser diversity starts with us:

The health of Firefox is critical now that Chromium will be the web’s de facto rendering engine.

Even if you love Chrome, adore Gmail, and live in Google Docs or Analytics, no single company, let alone a user-tracking advertising giant, should control the internet.

Andy Bell also writes about browser diversity:

I’ll say it bluntly: we must support Firefox. We can’t, as a community allow this browser engine monopoly. We must use Firefox as our main dev browsers; we must encourage our friends and families to use it, too.

Yes, it’s not perfect, nor are Mozilla, but we can help them to develop and grow by using Firefox and reporting issues that we find. If we just use and build for Chromium, which is looking likely (cough Internet Explorer monopoly cough), then Firefox will fall away and we will then have just one major engine left. I don’t ever want to see that.

Uncle Dave says:

If the idea of a Google-driven Web is of concern to you, then I’d encourage you to use Firefox. And don’t be a passive consumer; blog, tweet, and speak about its killer features. I’ll start: Firefox’s CSS Grid, Flexbox, and Variable Font tools are the best in the business.

Mozilla themselves came out all guns blazing when they said Goodbye, EdgeHTML:

Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.

Tim describes the situation as risking a homogeneous web:

I don’t think Microsoft using Chromium is the end of the world, but it is another step down a slippery slope. It’s one more way of bolstering the influence Google currently has on the web.

We need Google to keep pushing the web forward. But it’s critical that we have other voices, with different viewpoints, to maintain some sense of balance. Monocultures don’t benefit anyone.

Andre Alves Garzia writes that while we Blink, we lose the web:

Losing engines is like losing languages. People may wish that everyone spoke the same language, they may claim it leads to easier understanding, but what people fail to consider is that this leads to losing all the culture and way of thought that that language produced. If you are a Web developer smiling and happy that Microsoft might be adopting Chrome, and this will make your work easier because it will be one less browser to test, don’t be! You’re trading convenience for diversity.

I like that analogy with language death. If you prefer biological analogies, it’s worth revisiting this fantastic post by Rachel back in August—before any of us knew about Microsoft’s decision—all about the ecological impact of browser diversity:

Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be.

That post is a great history lesson, documenting how things can change, and how decisions can have far-reaching unintended consequences.

So these are the three browser engines we have: WebKit/Blink, Gecko, and EdgeHTML. We are unlikely to get any brand new bloodlines in the foreseeable future. This is it.

If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose its lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, and the unique takes on the Web it could allow for.

And it’s not likely to be replaced.

I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary.

Brian said it explicitly of his PhoneGap project:

The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap is to cease to exist.

That makes total sense, especially if your code is a polyfill—those solutions are temporary by design. Autoprefixer is another good example of a piece of code that becomes less and less necessary over time.

But I think it’s equally true of any successful framework or library. If the framework becomes popular enough, it will inevitably end up influencing the standards process, thereby becoming dispensible.

jQuery is the classic example of this. There’s very little reason to use jQuery these days because you can accomplish so much with browser-native JavaScript. But the reason why you can accomplish so much without jQuery is because of jQuery. I don’t think we would have querySelector without jQuery. The library proved the need for the feature. The same is true for a whole load of DOM scripting features.

The same process is almost certain to occur with React—it’s a good bet there will be a standardised equivalent to the virtual DOM at some point.

When Google first unveiled AMP, its intentions weren’t clear to me. I hoped that it existed purely to make itself redundant:

As well as publishers creating AMP versions of their pages in order to appease Google, perhaps they will start to ask “Why can’t our regular pages be this fast?” By showing that there is life beyond big bloated invasive web pages, perhaps the AMP project will work as a demo of what the whole web could be.

Alas, as time has passed, that hope shows no signs of being fulfilled. If anything, I’ve noticed publishers using the existence of their AMP pages as a justification for just letting their “regular” pages put on weight.

Worse yet, the messaging from Google around AMP has shifted. Instead of pitching it as a format for creating parallel versions of your web pages, they’re now also extolling the virtues of having your AMP pages be the only version you publish:

In fact, AMP’s evolution has made it a viable solution to build entire websites.

On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that Google are keen to change).

But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance …which is kind of odd, because that’s also what Google’s Polymer project is. The difference being that pages made with Polymer don’t get preferential treatment in Google’s search results. I can’t help but wonder how the Polymer team feels about AMP’s gradual pivot onto their territory.

If the AMP project existed in order to create a web where AMP was no longer needed, I think I could get behind it. But the more it’s positioned as the only viable solution to solving performance, the more uncomfortable I am with it.

Which, by the way, brings me to one of the most pernicious ideas around Google AMP—positioning anyone opposed to it as not caring about web performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because performance on the web is so important that it deserves a long-term solution, co-created by all of us: not some commandents delivered to us from on-high by one organisation, enforced by preferential treatment by that organisation’s monopoly in search.

It’s the classic logical fallacy:

1. Performance! Something must be done!
2. AMP is something.
3. Now something has been done.

By marketing itself as the only viable solution to the web performance problem, I think the AMP project is doing itself a great disservice. If it positioned itself as an example to be emulated, I would welcome it.

I wish that AMP were being marketed more like a temporary polyfill. And as with any polyfill, I look forward to the day when AMP is no longer necesssary.

I want AMP to become extinct. I genuinely think that the Google AMP team should share that wish.