Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#11

Post by antipaul »

This team is really something when it comes to transparency.

For a government entity, an unreasonably large amount of their work is on GitHub. Examples:

Front end design system: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend

Project board: https://github.com/orgs/alphagov/projects/4

Requests for comment: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-rfcs

Gov.uk infrastructure as code (WIP): https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-infrastructure

“The GDS way”: How they work, tech stack, processes, etc https://github.com/alphagov/gds-way

“Terraform modules for on-boarding with Cyber Security services eg define the IAM SecurityAudit role”: https://github.com/alphagov/cyber-security-shared-terraform-...

Full GitHub org with >1,500 repos: https://github.com/alphagov

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#12

Post by Warputin »

zht wrote: post #8
selfhoster11 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an accessibility problem. GOV.uk is the official government website that contains key information that must be made available to every UK resident. If shaving off 32K of JavaScript makes the website easier to load for people with extremely bad hardware, then it's worth it. BTW, the UK doesn't use dollars.

this is a bit pedantic I think it is okay to say "tax dollars" in general. I don't think you would generally expect people to say "tax euros" or "tax pounds" or "tax yen"

“Tax money” could work?

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#13

Post by pjc50 »

zht wrote: post #8
selfhoster11 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an accessibility problem. GOV.uk is the official government website that contains key information that must be made available to every UK resident. If shaving off 32K of JavaScript makes the website easier to load for people with extremely bad hardware, then it's worth it. BTW, the UK doesn't use dollars.

this is a bit pedantic I think it is okay to say "tax dollars" in general. I don't think you would generally expect people to say "tax euros" or "tax pounds" or "tax yen"

> I don't think you would generally expect people to say "tax euros" or "tax pounds" or "tax yen"

Depends which country you're in. It would be very weird for UK politicians to start talking about tax dollars, for example.

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#16

Post by snoopy_telex »

Warputin wrote: post #12
zht wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a bit pedantic I think it is okay to say "tax dollars" in general. I don't think you would generally expect people to say "tax euros" or "tax pounds" or "tax yen"

“Tax money” could work?

“Taxes” is all that is required

> the fix was spending a lot of tax dollars to replace it?

Reads fine as

> the fix was spending a lot of taxes to replace it?

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#17

Post by wonderbore »

Warputin wrote: post #14

32kb is nothing these days! Hopefully they have sane caching of their assets, which means it would rarely need to reload the asset.

Feels like you:

1. Didn't read the article (they dropped 13% of the entire page weight). The websites are already well below of "today’s average"

2. Don't understand the impact of having a page that loads instantly at the government level. These websites are not for fun, they must work well for everyone.

> the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#18

Post by robin_reala »

antipaul wrote: post #11

This team is really something when it comes to transparency. For a government entity, an unreasonably large amount of their work is on GitHub. Examples: Front end design system: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend Project board: https://github.com/orgs/alphagov/projects/4 Requests for comment: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-rfcs Gov.uk infrastructure as code (WIP): https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-infrastr…

Pretty much everything is on Github: it’s a requirement to be open unless you have an extremely good reason to be closed.[1] The only closed source project I ever worked with there was fraud detection for identity verification.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/making-source-c...

Re: How and why we removed jQuery from Gov.uk

#19

Post by incangold »

kordlessagain wrote: post #2

They presume a "problem" is loading 32KB of data and the fix was spending a lot of tax dollars to replace it? Insane.

It’s worth it.

gov.uk is an absolute delight to use exactly because of this kind of focus on the details and valuing of simplicity. I can’t think of another website that is more useable, and that is super important for a site that needs to work for a very diverse user base who have no choice but to use it.

I think you’d also be surprised how little this is likely to have cost compared to benefit to the tens of millions of users of these systems. GDS run a tight ship.

Post reply on HN