Facebook has announced that the extension on its SDK that allows publishers to create Instant Articles will now also build content publishable as Google AMP and, soon, Apple News articles.
Facebook launched the Instant Articles SDK extension to allow publishers to take advantage of this media-rich format, and since then, a host of publishers are using it to create fast-loading content. And now, Facebook has added the ability to also generate code for the Google AMP publishing format – the Apple News article format comes next – “in the coming weeks.”
Piyush Mangalick, partner engineering director at Facebook explained in a recent media blog post, that publishers taking part in its Journalism Project said that they faced a challenge of publishing on multiple platforms as its not that easy to get from one markup format to another. Doing so is “a resource-heavy step” in publishing on multiple platforms.
[quote]With an easy way to get from one markup format to another, publishers can then plug-and-play the markup in their content-management systems or third party publishing tools.[/quote]
With this move, Facebook also makes it easy for publishers to simply apply custom styling templates in AMP and Apple News that they have already created in the Instant Articles Style Editor. Custom fonts, colours, captions etc that have been created in the Style Editor will be “closely mirrored” in AMP and Apple News formats.
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