In reply to Nancy.

I haven't actually seen WordPress.org encouraging AMP, but Automattic does.

The AMP HTML part, first of the three technologies that makes AMP, is not "nonstandard" and not ignoring W3C "coding standards". It is a HTML framework, thus based on HTML. HTML is the extensible base, the replacement tags and restrictions are defined using W3C HTML. That's why it can be shown in web browsers with no add-ons. The are no "AMP readers".

How an AMP page looks has little to do with AMP as a technology, rather the fact that most themes lack full support for it. Using the "reader mode" of the AMP plugin will just generate a dull page, sometimes odd.

There is a lot to say about AMP, the project, standard and implementations, including misunderstandings. This post from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sums it all up quite well.