The best thing about this article is that it is short, a rare feat in today's world. So I don't want to scrutinize it too hard on its mere two examples:
It says, like Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, HTML should (1) require each img tag have the height and width specified, and (2) allow only the CSS filters that can be GPU-accelerated.
These are nice and all, but the problem is this. Why stop there? Why not forbid illegible fonts, text columns that are too wide or too narrow, green text on a red background, and assortment of other "poor UX"? Why not enforce that no page exceed the byte length of a Russian novel? (Now that's a law I can get behind [http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm].)
HTML could be better, but like all open-source projects, I'm amazed how good it is, and even more so how much better it is than any alternative offered for money.
Can we just create a community standard of plain-jane HTML to separate it from all this "publisher" junk that AMP stands for, and then build a gigantic web ring and a search engine and all that? Like tilde club but with standards enforcement. I'd put a weather forecast site like that on my home screen in an instant.
3. All CSS, Javascript, and font files must have subresource integrity hashes. The browser can cache anything with subresource integrity, even across site boundaries, since the hash guarantees the content value. This will speed up asset loading. No more loading "jquery.js" over and over.
4. All off-site content (ads, trackers, etc.) must go in iframes. All iframes must have a height and width, so rendering can proceed without waiting for them. This eliminates delays caused by slow ad servers. Iframe content is requested at a lower priority than main page content.
5. Rendering doesn't start until the entire main page is loaded, or a <page> tag is encountered for really long pages. Almost everybody has enough bandwidth now that we don't really need to frantically re-render as pages come in.
Number 3 is already possible and widely used by minification frameworks. They generate a file with a hash in the filename that is cached forever. It cuts network time but browser still re-parse it every time.
> Can we just create a community standard of plain-jane HTML to separate it from all this "publisher" junk that AMP stands for, and then build a gigantic web ring and a search engine and all that?
It says, like Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, HTML should (1) require each img tag have the height and width specified, and (2) allow only the CSS filters that can be GPU-accelerated.
These are nice and all, but the problem is this. Why stop there? Why not forbid illegible fonts, text columns that are too wide or too narrow, green text on a red background, and assortment of other "poor UX"? Why not enforce that no page exceed the byte length of a Russian novel? (Now that's a law I can get behind [http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm].)
HTML could be better, but like all open-source projects, I'm amazed how good it is, and even more so how much better it is than any alternative offered for money.