A new inclusive Open Web
The Open Web is been a battle field in the last few years, as walled gardens like facebook are growing and political agreements bring up net neutrality problems, there are issues that mine the openness of our community under the surface. A focus on what can be done to solve these issues in the next future.
We are the open world.
And by we I consider myself as part of a community that uses the web to express itself in the most rule-free way.
But technology has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it, and therefore we need to choose the right technology in order for our web “planet” to remain open as we wish it to be.
In our technocratic society technology choices impact on our life at least the same as political choices.
I would enjoy to go deeper into these concepts, but I found today a great article to explain all the willful intention behind the solutions I will show you in the next paragraph by Aaron Reynolds, I’m glad t link it here as I congratulate with the author for the clarity and honesty he shows.
So in few words, Ampproject is an open framework, built by Google, a company based on Open Web and as Reynolds says:
“Google are one of the largest stakeholders of an open web globally. Their business model is selling ads and web services, and they’re losing millions of new internet users to Facebook while billions more are coming online.
If standard web pages are going to compete with closed apps, usability and performance on the open web must be improved at scale, and fast.(…) Google need to get other people to optimise their web pages.”
To address the ideologic issues I ask you to read the whole Reynolds article, lets just say that there are rules, leaded by the concepts of usability of your technology, that affect its usage by emerging community, with poor infrastructure coverage as an example, or with an high level of mobile web usage, like we are experiencing in our everyday life.
WordPress is a huge part of this open world.
The 30% of the internet is run on this code, and it’s been contributed and expanded by an uncountable amount of people, through plugins and themes.
The dark side of this is that most of that people haven’t thought for a single moment about the inclusiveness and usability of what they have done, and the result is… a mess.
So the 30% of our open world is a mess, that’s it.
Ampproject was born to fix this, and Google is contributing actively in the wordpress community in order for all of us to be able to use it, and create a better web experience for everyone.
I’m not saying that Google is doing charity, I’m saying this is a massive operation for the web to turn on openness before it’s too late.
And to differ from the privacy invasive policy of most closed web apps as facebook amp provides a privacy preserving setup.
And we need to take our side in this battle, neutrality is not available as an option.
Anyway I have to say that Google isn’t the only corporate reality that has decided to take into account this issues, and that a part of that corporate realities is already pursuing the use of amp as a solution to this problems.
Developing WordPress in the right way and interacting with the new editor that’S coming soon in the 5.0 version is the main goal that Google and other corporate realities behind this CMS are pursuing, in many ways:
- A blog with the Roadmap
- providing an official checklist to migrate to the ampproject technology your website
- Providing some quick guide for publishers that want to get advantage of the mobile SEO exposure, ad clean ads system guaranteed by Ampproject.
- A few wordcamp seminars for developing themes and plugins (this one is by Alberto Medina, you should definitely follow him on twitter if interested)
- Providing free plugins and native themes, that interact with gutenberg to bring up the wordpress platform into a PWA
Progressive Web App is the future of the open web.
At least this is the Google statement while contributing at such a scale to the wordpress community ecosystem.
To better understand how Gutenberg is been developed in that way have a look to this article, very detailed about the direction of Google’s contribution to the wordpress community.
As an italian and part of the open web community, I cannot do anything less than appreciate the fact that there is a direction.
It is a matter of fact that PWAs are already part of the wordpress package, to go in depth on it take a look at this article about Jetpack’s last version, which includes some clear statement about the necessity of PWAs usage in the next future of our Open Web.
What’s left to say is for theme developers, like I am, I saw some linkedin paid course about this, please let them go… this is a native AmpProject theme for wordpress, complete with lessons and how to use, please refer to this, this is a Medina’s suggestion.