Summary

I2D: #26958

The <amp-sidebar> feature in stories has not achieved scale, but is creating an inconsistent user experience. It has also been brought up that the feature is an anomaly, as it's not one that's generally supported in story platforms. This has been demonstrated by the low adoption since launch, as compared to other features.

Rollout plan

After a period of 6 weeks (so at least May 11), we will deprecate the feature by removing its documentation and making its markup a no-op (documents will remain valid AMP).

This will make stories that have sidebar to not show the sidebar icon any more, so the sidebar cannot be triggered. The story itself will remain unchanged, and the pages are not affected by this removal.

Alternative implementation suggestion for developers using AMP

Rather than using links within a sidebar, publishers can look to these following suggestions:

1. Publishers can use <a> tags directly within their <amp-story-grid-layer> or <amp-story-cta-layer> tags
2. Publishers may load additional context in <amp-story-page-attachment>
3. Publishers can use <amp-story-player> to embed their story in another page, containing custom UI to present this data. Check a demo of this at https://codepen.io/mszylkowski/pen/dyOLKgE

Additional context

/cc @ampproject/wg-approvers