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The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

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Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#41

Post by robga »

samwillis wrote: post #5
ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

They all use this design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk . It's much more than just a CSS framework, it's full specifications on how to implement easy to follow and sensible UX. I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.

> I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.

You may be interested in Local Gov Drupal. Unfortunately they've defined themselves around a specific tool, rather than a design library, but maybe that was what it took to get them to come together. Seven councils are using the solution, and around 30 councils are involved in the initiative, but there is plenty of scope for the 300+ others to leverage the work and join the initiative.

https://localgovdrupal.org/

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#42

Post by midenginedcoupe »

samwillis wrote: post #19
was_a_dev wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine a buy-in by local councils is just that - a cost. And most councils are either poorly funded, poorly managed financially or both!

I'm not so sure, I think there is a real NIH syndrome in local government IT services, they quite often want to build something themselves - but then as you said don't have the budget to do it properly. Using the design system, and sharing platforms using it, would be a significant cost saving. Plus the (at times) antagonistic relationship between Whitehall and local government I think means they don't want to necess…

Not really.

Local gov doesn't have anything like the budget of central so they don't typically have the choice to build their own. Instead they're left with cobbling together behaviours from tens, maybe even hundreds, of disparate third-party systems, each independently solving the full stack of a given department's function. E.g. there's a dedicated system for planning approvals, another for administering blue badges, etc., etc.

These third-party systems are typically very cheaply made, with a very low maintenance budget, and don't provide anything like enough customisation to adhere to someone else's design system. If you're lucky you can add your own header/footer and set some main css colours to match your council's brand.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#43

Post by jiggywiggy »

magnio wrote: post #16
ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries: - The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ - The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ - Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html - Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/ - Italy: https://designers.italia.it/ - Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/ - Estonia: http…

It's nice, but also gets boring and restrive quiet quickly in Governmental organisations I've worked for.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#44

Post by mananaysiempre »

NohatCoder wrote: post #32
ctrlmeta wrote: post #4

Has anyone noticed how all UK government websites like https://www.gov.uk/ , https://www.nhs.uk/ , https://tfl.gov.uk/ , https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ have the same look-and-feel and the same UX? Are there more such examples of countries that have uniform UX for their government websites?

Coming from Denmark I'm impressed that they all use a uk domain, and they even have a system in place to distinguish official government websites from others. In Denmark we are like: Need a domain for our common ID and login system? How about nemid.nu, where .nu is the TLD of Niue, but "nu" means "now" in Danish, so lol, let's use that. On top of like 7 other domains that users are randomly redirected between during…

The UK. domain is one of the few that used to reproduce and enforce (almost) the gTLD hierarchy under itself, thus CO.UK., ORG.UK., GOV.UK., etc. (They gave up several years ago I think.)

(Unlike with almost every other ccTLD, UK is also not the ISO code for the country—GB is—and is instead “reserved”, which is why I must struggle to remember each time that the BCP 47 for Ukrainian-in-Ukraine is uk-UA.)

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#45

Post by myfonj »

youngtaff wrote: post #36
myfonj wrote: post #22

What I miss in this otherwise excellent article is more insight about methodology. There is just murky > We run tests every day on GOV.UK pages using specific simulated devices and connection speeds. Because we can repeat these tests every day, it allows us to monitor what the changes we are making to the site are doing for real users visiting GOV.UK. with no mention whether those were all cold start loads or simulat…

From the post > For example, for a simulated user visiting the Universal Credit start page on a low specification device and 2G mobile connection, we can clearly see from the graph where the jQuery change was made. Even if the cost of jQuery can be amortised over multiple page views in a session, someone's still got to have a successful first page view before they can view any more For a service like Universal Credit…

Yes, but still no notion if it was really just that "Universal Credit *start page*" [1] load measured or if it was some more realistic scenario, like, you know, navigating to some page that this guidepost links to. Loading just the start guidepost does not make much sense from the user's perspective.

Again, I really do not want to attack their conclusions, I'm just curious how much (if at all (!)) would browser cache be beneficial here.

(I'm not even sure browser generally caches once parsed chunks, but I assume they probably do.)

[1] https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit (presumably)

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#46

Post by wildrhythms »

iopq wrote: post #2

When I did web development, I specifically loaded JS lazily so first you got a pure HTML page with just a few lines of code. Those lines of code are normal (not jQuery) JS that loads the rest of the JS lazily in a progressive enhancement. This means the page can start being rendered before the jQuery code loads. But in fact, jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a…

You have to really do some extra work to make this happen "nicely". Swapping out parts of the page without jerking the user around is a difficult problem, especially if you aren't working with fixed sizes of elements. And creating a "skeleton" system of placeholders during loading is a whole other set of state you have to build out and maintain.

I find most sites using this kind of progressive loading are completely useless during the loading phase... What's the point of showing the user a page full of skeleton/loading placeholders? You might as well have just server-rendered the whole thing and made the user wait an extra second or two.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#47

Post by neysofu »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #43
magnio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries: - The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ - The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ - Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html - Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/ - Italy: https://designers.italia.it/ - Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/ - Estonia: http…

It's nice, but also gets boring and restrive quiet quickly in Governmental organisations I've worked for.

> Boring

I feel like that's a great quality. As for restrictive, that's a valid concern.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#48

Post by chiefalchemist »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #43
magnio wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is an example of government design systems, which are becoming popular among developed countries: - The UK: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ - The US: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ - Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/about/design-system.html - Argentina: https://argob.github.io/poncho/ - Italy: https://designers.italia.it/ - Singapore: https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/ - Estonia: http…

It's nice, but also gets boring and restrive quiet quickly in Governmental organisations I've worked for.

Perhaps. But user expectations are otherwise. Especially when lack of guardrails too often leads to wacky and wonky experiences.

Re: The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance

#49

Post by wraptile »

iopq wrote: post #2

When I did web development, I specifically loaded JS lazily so first you got a pure HTML page with just a few lines of code. Those lines of code are normal (not jQuery) JS that loads the rest of the JS lazily in a progressive enhancement. This means the page can start being rendered before the jQuery code loads. But in fact, jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a…

> jQuery is largely not needed since Internet Explorer lost market share and there's less of a need to have lots of workarounds for it.

As someone who's late to the webdev party I feel that jQuery is pretty awesome (all I ever heard is people poopoo it). The vanilla API for the DOM manipulation is just plainly awful and borderline nonsensical so I'd say jQuery is still very much needed.

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