Ads on the internet are based on decades old tech rooted in running untrusted & potentially unsafe JS. We are on a multiyear journey to fix this. This project reached a major milestone with 12% of display ads served by Google being based on @AMPhtml ads blog.google/products/ads/mak…

What ever you think about AMP, ads not being able to run arbitrary JavaScript, and having a format that can be verified to be safe without trusting the source is a huge step forward for the health of the web. No more bitcoin mining, auto-redirects, etc.

So you’re saying this requires AMP and Google couldn’t have used its power to do the same thing with plain HTML?

You need to subset HTML, because HTML itself isn’t safe. Luckily ads only need a tiny subset of HTML. On other hand they need some superset (say a carousel UI). There wasn’t exactly much competition for safe subsets and supersets of HTML.

Google punishes certain uses of HTML all the time. They could have done the same here, without creating a new non-standard

What parts of AMP are non-standard? I don’t use it personally so I don’t know all the details, but on the surface it looks like any other library/framework out there.

ampproject.org/learn/overvie… “AMP HTML is basically HTML extended with custom AMP properties”

Are you objecting to the use of custom HTML attributes (red arrow)? To be clear, the <amp-accordion> element in the screenshot is a *standard* custom element.

Yeah, sigh. Modern HTML explicitly allows this, of course. That is what custom elements and custom attributes are all about. The use of dashes makes them strictly non-conflicting with attributes that have semantics in non-custom HTML.

I am not objecting to those tags. I am a big fan of custom elements. My problem with AMP is the whole concept of a certain very powerful company advocating for the use of something other than just plain good semantic HTML for something it’s completely sufficient for.