Google recently announced support for AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in Gmail. Within a day, a post by Devin Coldewey appeared at Techcrunch titled AMP for email is a terrible idea. Is it really a terrible idea? I think time will tell.

Devin Coldewey points out a number of facts about e-mail and I agree with all of them. However, I think he is overreaching when it comes to AMP inside e-mail.

E-mail messages carry attachments and some of these attachments are rendered within the client and some are not. A long time ago, people started embedding HTML inside e-mail messages and images that are referenced within that HTML as attachments. I never liked that at the time as I was using Pine to read my e-mail and plain text was all I cared for, but others were adamant about it and guess what, the consensus said a modern e-mail client should render HTML and an array of image formats inline. So, today that is the norm. I am sure somebody thought about displaying pdf attachments (wink Mac Mail) or Excel spreadsheets inline, but that is not the expected behavior across the board. A number of e-mail applications, that also power some sort of groupware and collaboration features, use in message tags or attachments to communicate information and update calendar schedules. Why is AMP any different?

I agree with the sentence “an idea borne out of competitive pressure and existing leverage” but would use it along with a bunch of other harsher wording to describe some of the propriety mambo jumbo Outlook incorporates. The key word being “proprietary”.

So what Gmail decided to render AMP content inline? Eudora did the same couple decades ago for images and consensus decided. As long as it is open it can be replicated by other e-mail clients and the public consensus will drive its progress. I am all for putting it out there. We’ll see in a few years.

Now, explaining e-mail as similar to sidewalks, electrical outlets, or forks, that is brilliant. Right on.