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I am of two minds on the subject and this question has arisen out of an answer provided to the question in Psychology & Neuroscience Is there a benefit for humans to lose memory access when under elongated periods of stress?.

Google developed the AMP project (originally Accelerated Mobile Pages) for better performance using mobile devices, and the answer provided a link to an article by the Cleveland Clinic which was an AMP project link rather than a regular URL pointing to the main website. Below are both kinds of links pointing to the same article, but via different methods.

Viewing the article using the AMP project URL on a computer, the page is a lot narrower and not using the full width of the screen, plus the content is bland as it is more geared for mobile phones.

Viewing the article using the regular URL on a computer is more intuitive to me as it has better formatting for ease of reading in my view.

Viewing the article using the regular URL on a mobile phone is fine as the website is mobile friendly and adjusts the page according to the phone resolution, etc.

What is the community's view regarding the use of AMP project links within questions and answers? Should they be avoided for better reading via computer screens seeing as websites should be mobile friendly anyway?

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    What do the people active on Psychology & Neuroscience think? Did you ask them via their meta? – Robert Longson Mar 27 at 9:57
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    Google is somewhat notorious for killing off projects. Also I wonder if in this case OP looked up the link on their phone, got pointed at amp cause... google, and linked the source via that – Journeyman Geek♦ Mar 27 at 9:58
  • That is probably the way it happened @JourneymanGeek and part of the problem. Maybe Glorfindel's answer could rectify that problem. – Chris Rogers Mar 27 at 10:05
  • tbh, the answer could use a little editing to neaten up the format and changing the link could be done alongside that. – Journeyman Geek♦ Mar 27 at 10:09
  • I could have asked in the Psychology & Neuroscience Meta @RobertLongson but this has the potential to be a StackExchange wide issue as pointed out with a related issue Glorfindel linked. I think it is better asked here as it will affect not only the instigating site, but all StackExchange sites – Chris Rogers Mar 27 at 10:10
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In similar spirit, we have a feature request Automatically convert links to popular mobile pages (such as the mobile Wikipedia) to point to the corresponding regular pages. Here as well, I would prefer linking to the full version of the website instead of the AMP project. I appreciate the concern for mobile users, but there are other solutions: Safari on iOS has a Reader view to adapt non-mobile friendly websites when the user deems necessary. (I'm not sure about Android, I don't use it that often.)

And most important: a post should never depend on the external link for being useful; users should always include the relevant content into the post itself, and use the link for reference. The link may break (it may even be used in the future to host malicious content), or the linked website may be blocked for some users. See Are answers that just contain links elsewhere really "good answers"? and Your answer is in another castle: when is an answer not an answer? for reference.

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