Accelerated Mobile Pages

Over the last week I have been messing around with adding Structured Data to my pages so that Google can display Rich Cards. Google hasn't yet indexed my pages with structured data so there's not much I can say about that so far. I have also been playing with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which are lightweight pages designed specifically for mobile devices.

The two resources for AMP which I've found to be useful are AMP Project and AMP By Example. Unfortunately neither of them goes into a whole lot of detail about how to implement this stuff and I haven't been able to find very good explanations online. However I've been able to solve most of the issues I've encountered by trial and error.

The biggest difference between AMP and normal HTML is that AMP does not allow Javascript, nor does it allow linked CSS. All CSS must be inline, must total less than 50kB, and the only Javascript you can use is special Javascript from AMP Project. All images must have sizes defined and forms work a bit differently. The reason for this is to avoid any blocking resources that could slow the load of the page. I have been using Bootstrap CSS which I thought would be compatible as it is responsive and displays great on mobile devices, but it's too big and uses Javascript. I ended up using Bootstrap's Customizer to only output the elements I needed and then minified that and included it into my page. At some point I will clean out unused styles from the CSS to trim it down even more, but I was able to get my CSS to just barely fit the maximum size requirements by only using the bare minimum.

AMP isn't really all that complicated - it really just restricts what you can use in the page, but there were a couple things that I really struggled with. Those were, in order of difficulty:

1. Creating a menu bar - my Bootstrap nav uses drop-downs which use Javascript so would not work. I had to create a simplified menu bar, but luckily amp has specific tags for this which were pretty easy to figure out.
2. Creating a comments form on my blog - AMP does not support normal forms. You can use GET forms as usual, but for post you need to use XHR. 
3. Forcing the user to login before they can post a comment - AMP has very specific requirements for validation which requires you to make XML requests to certain pages and which requires the pages to return certain responses. I have this working right now, but there are still some kinks I need to iron out.

I will post more articles on each of these three issues and my solutions to them over the next few days, as I get the kinks worked out.