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• The discussion touches on issues of fake news, conspiracy theories, and the potential for untrustworthy sources to game the system |
• Alex Sexton acknowledges that while AMP has its flaws, killing it would not necessarily solve the underlying problems of misinformation on the web |
• Centralization of AMP pages and its performance benefits |
• Concerns about relying on a centralized system for performance |
• Ease of integration of AMP into existing websites |
• Potential backlash against AMP due to serving different content to Google vs users |
• JavaScript fatigue and the burden of choice among various frameworks, libraries, and tools |
• The unique challenges of the JavaScript community in terms of "paralysis of choice" |
• The concept of "JavaScript fatigue" refers to the overwhelming number of frameworks and tools available for building web applications |
• This problem predates the npm ecosystem but has been accelerated by it |
• Frameworks have always been a part of web development, but the explosion in their number has made it difficult for developers to keep up |
• The issue is not just about learning new tools, but also about the hidden semantics and complexity that come with using frameworks |
• This can lead to a narrow worldview among developers who specialize in specific frameworks or technologies |
• There are alternatives to this approach, such as using small components with understandable inputs and outputs, which can make it easier to adopt new modules and replace old ones |
• Frameworks helping to prevent JavaScript fatigue by making many choices by default |
• The problem of module makers creating many different versions of the same thing contributing to JS fatigue |
• The tradeoff between learning new tools and gaining speed in application development |
• The role of free markets and innovation driving new solutions in web and JavaScript tooling |
• The debate on whether innovation is driven by new capabilities or new use cases |
• New frameworks emerging as a response to new problems or challenges, rather than underlying platform changes |
• Underutilization of language-level features that could simplify development, such as tagged template literals |
• The potential for new technologies and patterns to emerge once the next set of use cases is understood. |
• The discussion revolves around a new library that allows for easier use of SVG and math operations |
• The mid-level API makes it accessible for users who aren't familiar with intense SVG coding |
• Comparison to D3, where many libraries use D3 as an underlying tool but require knowledge of D3 itself |
• Discussion about how the new library could be used in conjunction with other libraries and its potential impact on the ecosystem |
• Criticism of D3's complexity and difficulty for non-visual programmers to understand |
• Comparison to other types of programming, such as WebGL, which is also complex and difficult to understand |
• The introduction of Rachel White's pick: Tracery, a library that allows for easier generative storytelling through grammar objects |
• Discussion about the format of their podcast being similar to "mad libs" stories |
• Mikeal Rogers' pick of the week: Lemonade Stand, a repository of open source funding models by Nadia Eghbal |
• Alex Sexton's pick of the week: Intl.js library, a polyfill for internationalization and formatting in web development |
• Brief conversation about Andy Earnshaw's polyfill for Intl.js and its limitations |
• Mikeal Rogers' question about whether Intl.js can convert foreign exchange rate currencies |
• Humorous exchange about Mikeal's European travel plans and the strength of the US dollar |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Hey, welcome to JS Party, where it's a party every week with JavaScript! Joining me is Rachel White, say hello... |
**Rachel White:** Hello. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And Alex Sexton... |
**Alex Sexton:** You don't tell me what to do? You just tell Rachel what to do? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Yup, exactly... And I'm Mikeal Rogers. So let's dive into it today. We have some pretty deep topics that I wanna get into. |
They just had an AMP Conf (Accelerated Mobile Pages Conf, from Google). Alex, why don't you tell us what the hell these are? What is AMP? |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. I work with AMPs a lot. They're small (sometimes large) electronic devices that use voltage multiplication usually through like an op-amp or a series of transformers, resistors, capacitors, in order to increase -- different amps. Okay... \[laughter\] Accelerated Mobile Pages are a thing Google ca... |
Specifically, what it actually is is something you can kind of opt your content website in. This is usually news articles, they're by far the number one use case. You opt in your content site to AMP, and then you promise to fulfill a few somewhat difficult to fulfill things where you don't use external CSS and you don'... |
The resulting experience is that when you go to Google and you search for a news article, there's a little carousel up top; it seems unimportant, but that's actually why most people do it, to get in that little carousel. And there's little lightning bolts next to the websites in order to incentivize people to build AMP... |
The negative side that people dislike is a) Google is hosting all the content, so they end up being the controller and the gate and have all the information about all the traffic, and then also the URLs are really not great, because it's gonna be google.com/AMParticle/yourURLtoYourWebsite... Which is better than them h... |
**Rachel White:** \[04:01\] Yeah, that's helpful for me. I actually didn't even know what AMP was until last week when everyone came to New York for AMP Conf, but I had noticed while browsing the internet when I'm trying to fall asleep and I'm trying to read the articles... I've had these - now that I know - AMP articl... |
I'm okay with the speed; obviously, that makes a lot more sense, but please, someday let me copy a link faster somehow... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, so I think it's gotten better very recently... You can click on the URL of the article, which is in the top bar; they always put this nav bar above your nav bar that kind of says the real URL - I think now you can click on that and go to the real website. If that doesn't work, you can always do t... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You said that it makes things faster... Sorry, Rachel... |
**Rachel White:** It's okay, you go ahead first. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It's a merge conflict. So you mentioned that it makes things faster - what is making it faster? There's a new format, which is HTML and JavaScript, so it's somewhat different than the web... |
**Alex Sexton:** Was that a joke? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, no... Go ahead. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sorry, I guess I don't understand what you're saying then. It's still all valid HTML/JavaScript. You add a lightning bolt to your HTML element (it's a fun little UNICODE trick) and then you write regular CSS and JavaScript, but you do things like use custom elements for your images; that way, your imag... |
So there's a bunch of rules, and they have a JavaScript you can inject on your page that will validate all these rules, that will say "Hey, you're not following this rule; you may not be pipelined into the superfast AMP experience." |
The other part is if you use Chrome, Chrome can do extra things to pre-fetch, and stuff. I don't know to the extent of which that happens, but they absolutely could do that, based on their rule set. |
They're pretty much like asm.js that we talked about last week. Asm.js is a completely valid subset of JavaScript, but once you only restrict yourself to that subset, you can make certain speed improvements happen. The same thing is true of AMP. And I think the arguments are more or less the exact same for and against ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So what's making it fast? That Google caching it and Chrome creating it differently? |
**Alex Sexton:** It's both. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Or is it the fact that you can't insert your ads and you can't do all these things that destroy performance? |
**Alex Sexton:** \[07:51\] It's everything. I think one of the primary benefits... I think out of context, AMP is a bad idea and we shouldn't do it. Why would we do that? It centralizes things and it's bad, and blah-blah-blah... But I think in context, if you look at -- I can't remember the exact stat... If you look at... |
So Google's one-upping them, saying "Hey, let's do this all with the real web, without apps, without all these things... And if you don't follow these rules and you don't sign up for AMP, you don't put the attribute and you don't do any of these things, your site's gonna be so much faster anyways...", so it's kind of l... |
So it's kind of a little bit of everything, but the fundamental thing is AMP could die tomorrow and no one would be screwed. I think that's pretty critical. |
**Rachel White:** I have a question. |
**Alex Sexton:** Sure. |
**Rachel White:** So people that are participating in this... If I'm a news publication that decides to integrate these AMP pages for my articles... Say The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Sun-Times all write similar articles about the same thing - is this gonna affect who shows up? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. |
**Rachel White:** Oh, that's interesting. |
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