HTML email is reborn, while Google adds AMP to your inbox

Google sends AMP, its simplified version of HTML, to email. Starting today, Gmail on the Web will be able to support integrated AMP content and then roll it out to mobile clients later. Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail and Mail.Ru will also join Gmail, with their respective developers promising to add support soon.

AMP for email is not just a heated version of email with HTML formatting. Integrated AMP content can offer features like interactivity without having to click away from your inbox. For example, an online store may send you an email about a product or promotion that may be of interest to you, and AMP integration can help scroll through product images and even start the process. d & # 39; purchase. Or Pinterest can email you a selection of the most popular items of the day and pin them directly from your inbox.

Accelerated mobile pages were introduced by Google in 2015 as a small set of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS features that produced fast pages to download and display, which can be easily grouped and can be embedded, for example , to Google pages of search results. JavaScript functionality was limited to those offered by a library provided by Google. This greatly reduces the range of tasks that pages can do in favor of extreme cache usability and consistent performance.

AMP encountered some resistance when introduced. Web developers have questioned the approach of Google – its JavaScript library is used to define special tags instead of using conventional HTML – as well as the need for a narrowly defined specific format for get good performance. Some of these concerns were resolved by Google's plan to develop AMP on Web standards and introduce a new governance model that gave control to two committees. Sitting on these committees, representatives from the technology industry and content editing would be represented.

It can be argued that these limitations allow the interactivity of AMPs in email. It would be dangerous to support a full and unlimited range of browser JavaScript functionality in an HTML email, but the same danger does not exist for AMP email because the JavaScript library is carefully controlled and limited. AMP emails can not execute arbitrary scripts. instead, they opt for some prepackaged behaviors that they want to use.