Get AMP’d: Here’s what publishers need to know about Google’s new plan to speed up your website

The speed gains are very real. But do publishers want to trade in the open space of what we’ve known as the web for yet another platform they have little control over?

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Google unveiled its new plan to speed up the mobile web today — Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP — and it’s the latest attempt by a technology company to deal with the problem of the slow mobile web.  

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Google’s incentive here is obvious: It makes its money on advertising, and the vast majority of that advertising is on the open web. If Facebook (or some other platform, but seriously, Facebook) provides a markedly better mobile experience than the open web does, those advertising opportunities (and that user data) disappears into Zuckerberg’s Walled Garden of Earthly Delights. 

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So what is AMP?

AMP is a number of technologies rolled into one. The first and most important is what we might call code subsetting. HTML, the language webpages are built in, includes some things that load quickly and others that load slowly. AMP aims to kill off the slow parts, most notably JavaScript.
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CSS is also strictly limited in AMP HTML (“The restriction is in place to make overall performance easier to reason about. It may be opened up in the future”). Among the banned are the common CSS properties used for animation.
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By essentially supplanting the native rendering engine in a mobile browser, AMP can load or unload assets at will — not worrying about images until they’re nearly in view, for instance, or loading editorial text content first and ads second.
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What about ads? Essentially all ad networks use third-party JavaScript, which is banned in AMP. So there’s something called amp-ad to take its place:
Only five ad networks are supported at first, four of them owned by Google, Amazon, and AOL. 
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/get-ampd-heres-what-publishers-need-to-know-about-googles-new-plan-to-speed-up-your-website/