Google announced last night that they are looking to bring the benefits and techniques they have learned from the AMP efforts to the open web standards. Google said "we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel."
So that might mean that if you were working on making an AMP version of your web site, you might be able to hold off on that and see how this goes. Of course, making changes to the web standards can take a long long time, so if you were about to launch your AMP pages, I would go ahead and do that. But in a few years from now, you might be able to use normal HTML and have AMP like features embedded into them (if that makes sense).
Malte Ubl, Tech Lead for the AMP Project at Google wrote:
We are taking what we learned from AMP, and are working on web standards that will allow instant loading for non-AMP web content. We hope this work will also unlock AMP-like embeddability that powers Google Search features like the Top Stories carousel. Meanwhile, AMP will be Google’s well-lit path to creating great user experiences on the web. It will be just one of many choices, but it will be the one we recommend. We will continue to invest heavily in AMP. A key example of how we continue to innovate on user experience on the web are AMP Stories and we hope to provide insights to future web standards along that way.
Google will be publishing these efforts over here and said clearly "it is hard to estimate when these changes will roll out as it depends on future progress of standardization and browser implementations."
💥 Would you like your content to be integrated in Google Search features like the Top Stories carousel, but not use AMP? 👊
— Malte Ubl (@cramforce) March 8, 2018
📋 Here is our plan to enable this based on future web standards, objective performance and user experience metrics https://t.co/GGXddfKEBo
A WebmasterWorld thread has webmasters and publishers asking if they should now bother going forward with AMP and making an additional version of their site:
Interesting... I was just about to start working on coding and implementing AMP in my websites. Now this gives me something to think about if Google plans to maybe go a different direction eventually. I can't see them keeping 2 sets of standards that do similar things.
Overall, if Google can bake the benefits of AMP into the open web standards - I think a lot of the criticism around AMP would go away and it would be a win-win for everyone.
What are you thinking?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Twitter.
