We’ve updated the AMP Roadmap to reflect progress on existing priorities as well as several new projects. You can see the highlights below:
Format
amp-bind, a flexible event binding system supporting more interactivity in AMP is now fully available in production. To find out more about the range of capabilities this feature brings to AMP, read our blog post. Recently we’ve also launched support for validating form inputs via AJAX (experimental but launching soon – example) and the building blocks to compose search-autosuggest using amp-bind.
We are also working on a set of features geared toward engaging experiences in AMP. Specifically, we’re planning to improve amp-image-lightbox this quarter, so developers can easily implement an immersive lightbox experience synced with amp-carousel. Scroll-bound animations are also slated to launch in the next couple months. Once that’s in place, we’ll re-purpose the general solution for parallax scrolling and contextually-displayed headers. Video will also get a new scroll-bound feature: the ability to minimize to the corner of the viewport after the inline video is scrolled away. This will enable users to seamlessly engage with other content on the page at the same time as a featured video.
In addition, we will soon make available new templates for AMP Start to help developers in more verticals make great-looking AMP pages. We’re also making it easier to configure AMP Start pages without having to edit code directly by developing an AMP Start template configurator.
Finally, we’ve started work on some longer-term features to support even more interactivity.
- E-commerce websites in particular will benefit from dedicated client-side sorting & filtering components, as well as a date picker.
- Those of you building responsive pages will benefit from a revamped sidebar component that has the ability to change display format based on the width of the viewport. For example, users can have a toggle-able sidebar on mobile that changes into a fixed-position header on desktop.
- We’re expanding the capabilities of embedded content in AMP by supporting messaging between amp-iframe and other elements in the parent document.
Analytics
As Q2 ended, we have begun to focus on supporting video analytics natively in amp-analytics, starting with amp-video. Available experimentally now and coming to production next week, publishers will be able to capture video-specific data that’s associated with video events like play and pause. The spec is available at the link above, so please give us any feedback on how the proposal matches up with your needs.
On other fronts, we are wrapping up work from the previous quarter to allow AMP extensions to collect data using amp-analytics, we plan to start work to support filters soon, and we expect to have various projects that add further ways to customize amp-analytics, like the reportWhen feature listed in the roadmap.
Ads
We’ve been working on helping publishers enhance ad request information for better targeting and therefore better monetization using a new feature called Real Time Config (RTC). RTC helps publishers earn more from their AMP inventory by enhancing the ad request with things like cookie-based targeting information or more broadly any audience related information in a safe and performant manner without negative consequences to the user experience. We want to ensure all targeting based use cases can be implemented using RTC. We look forward to your input on the Github Issue.
We are also addressing a long standing ask to enable sponsorship campaigns where advertisers require competitive exclusions or roadblocks in AMP pages. We’ve begun work on the ability to correlate all ad requests on an AMP page to achieve this functionality and will soon open it up for testing in experimental. Please let us know on Github if you’d like to test drive this feature.
As a reminder, we have a number of innovative AMP Ads (e.g. Lightbox ads created in AMP format) available on AMP By Example to modify and use for your own campaigns for free. With the launch of amp-animation, scroll bound animation based ads are also easy to incorporate in your direct sold campaigns.
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Thanks to the AMP development community for your work and feedback. As always, please let us know if you have any issues or feature requests.
Posted by Vamsee Jasti, Product Manager, AMP Project