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aaronpk_tv
An interesting proposal to allow websites to detect certain SMS messages. The UX implications are fascinating.
Philosophically, I’m completely against Google’s AMP project and AMP for Email, too. I will always side with the open web and the standards that power it, and AMP is actively working against both. I’m all-in on a faster web for everyone, but I just can’t get behind Google’s self-serving method for providing that faster web.
I’d say the single most important lesson to take away here, for a technology project at least, is that interoperability is key.
- Assume that no matter how amazing your new tech is, people are going to adopt it slowly.
- Give your early adopters every chance you can to use your offering together with the existing tools that they will continue to need in order to work with people who haven’t caught up yet.
- And if you’re building a communication tool, make it as simple as possible for others to build compatible tools, because they will expand the network of people your users can communicate with to populations you haven’t thought of and probably don’t understand.
Any new web standard must be easy enough to understand and implement that a developer can get something up and running in an afternoon. HTML, HTTP and RSS all adhere to these principles. So do the indieweb protocols, which is why we support them and think they are likely to succeed.
Standards work best when they are focused. Don’t build an 18 wheeler to drive a city block. Standards often fail because committees with very different complex goals come together without actual working implementations to sanity check both the complexity (see point 1 above) and the intelligibility (see point 2 above).