Google announced last night that they are looking to bring the benefits and techniques they have learned from the AMP efforts to the open web standards. Google said “we now feel ready to take the next step and work to support more instant-loading content not based on AMP technology in areas of Google Search designed for this, like the Top Stories carousel.”

So that might mean that if you were working on making an AMP version of your web site, you might be able to hold off on that and see how this goes. Of course, making changes to the web standards can take a long long time, so if you were about to launch your AMP pages, I would go ahead and do that. But in a few years from now, you might be able to use normal HTML and have AMP like features embedded into them (if that makes sense).

Malte Ubl, Tech Lead for the AMP Project at Google wrote:

Google will be publishing these efforts over here and said clearly “it is hard to estimate when these changes will roll out as it depends on future progress of standardization and browser implementations.”

A WebmasterWorld thread has webmasters and publishers asking if they should now bother going forward with AMP and making an additional version of their site:

Overall, if Google can bake the benefits of AMP into the open web standards – I think a lot of the criticism around AMP would go away and it would be a win-win for everyone.

What are you thinking?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Twitter.