> A given page may only need a dozen kilobytes of CSS
I think you would be challenged to find a single page that needed that much; please give an example if you have one. Most single page articles I have tested use less than 5kb. codepen.com uses like 6 kb on load of a new pen. gmail.com completely loads with 5kb and doesn't load more.
> For example a news article might have a video player, audio player, image carousel, map, data tables, scroll away images, etc.
This is definitely a concern, but 50kb is high enough that you should be able to fit custom css for everything you mentioned. I think 10x what most single pages use is pretty reasonable, and certainly not "an absurdly small, arbitrary limit".
A significant portion of time is spent calculating styles from css so keeping it small is a real bonus to load times.
> AMP's approach is workable, but is at odds with how most sites and frameworks use CSS, and means the web framework and static resource build pipeline have to be redesigned around AMP constraints.
Pretty much every site I have looked at since my first comment besides Github loads less than 50kb (much of which is unused) anyway. If you are really hitting the 50kb limit, you probably need to redesign anyway for desktop so AMP should come mostly for free.
I think you would be challenged to find a single page that needed that much; please give an example if you have one. Most single page articles I have tested use less than 5kb. codepen.com uses like 6 kb on load of a new pen. gmail.com completely loads with 5kb and doesn't load more.
> For example a news article might have a video player, audio player, image carousel, map, data tables, scroll away images, etc.
This is definitely a concern, but 50kb is high enough that you should be able to fit custom css for everything you mentioned. I think 10x what most single pages use is pretty reasonable, and certainly not "an absurdly small, arbitrary limit".
A significant portion of time is spent calculating styles from css so keeping it small is a real bonus to load times.
> AMP's approach is workable, but is at odds with how most sites and frameworks use CSS, and means the web framework and static resource build pipeline have to be redesigned around AMP constraints.
Pretty much every site I have looked at since my first comment besides Github loads less than 50kb (much of which is unused) anyway. If you are really hitting the 50kb limit, you probably need to redesign anyway for desktop so AMP should come mostly for free.