AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages for MVC ASP.Net

Google has a new mobile standard for html that strays from the recent common knowledge involving responsive web pages which show the same html for both mobile and desktop traffic, but which reformats itself to the width of the browser Instead, Accelerated Mobile Pages ( or AMP ) actualy adds a lot of resrictions and some new tags and other goodies with the intention of making the mobile experience much faster. This has been the common compliant I’ve had with the mobile web- even with a powerful smartphone on a fast connection, the web experience is often very slow and just bad. I’m not even sure why some pages are so terrible when they even seem to be built to support mobile, but they just are. This must be the resaoning behind the new AMP standard. 

AMP has recently been in the news because google has indicated that sites supporting AMP will soon receive a bit of an SEO boost. So now, many webmasters who depend on search engine traffic are scrambling to deploy AMP-enabled versions of their sites to take advantage of this slight…advantage. 

Since most of my web projects run on ASP.Net MVC, I’m looking to implement AMP using some boilerplate template code. I’ve checked Nuget and haven’t found anything in there yet. Maybe we’ll have to develop this and add it to the nuget repository. 

Have any of you built or found something to help accelerate developing and/or deploying AMP using .Net MVC? Comment below to discuss further. 

Jquery mobile is broken

A while back we produced our first “mobile specific” web app, which was produced with Jquery Mobile. This framework seems to make building forms etc so easy for mobile. But after we did a bit of testing on some mobile devices, we soon realized this pretty ui is not without issues. We have various input controls that would simply refuse to work correctly, and even had a date picker control that would… somehow?… actually crash the browser. After a lot of headache and retesting, and removing anything beyond just the most basic of input controls, we finally got things working well enough to release it.

But now I’m finding that, not only was our experience no uncommon, it seems that many others have not done the testing we did and discover the bugs… and have actually deployed production websites using JQM… that simply do not work. I first noticed this with a popular ecommerce package that released mobile extensions- browsing certain pages just simply did not work. So customers who had deployed this option would actually see their mobile sales drop a bunch, instead of improve them as they should. I’ve even seen some analysis that “mobile traffic is junk”, which I’m not convinced is derived from some similiar issues to this.

And just in the last two weeks, I’ve personally encountered 2 other production sites that are having serious mobile website issues that make them unusable to many mobile users.

Is Jquery Mobile doing more harm than good?