171–180 of 195 posts
I have to admit, as a Spaniard that moved 7 years ago to the UK, that the government related sites are an absolute pleasure to work with. Taxes, information of any kind etc everything clear and straightforward. I take my hat off. PS: Does anyone know the stack they use?
nhs.uk is built using Wagtail, a Django based CMS.
On the surface looks like a great example of inner sourcing.
I was surprised to see a gov.uk page on progressive enhancement and their thoughts on it ( https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... ). I asked on HN yesterday if PE was dead and everyone seems to think it's dead, and yet gov.uk gets lots of love. Maybe it's not dead :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779408
I used to design sites like this explicitly in the mid-00s. I would explicitly test with no js and no CSS. I still aim to do it to this day, but it's hard to get others to do it when most web devs are happy to throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.
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I can understand that, but I think it's very subjective. For example, it's an opportunity to explain what the form is, and give any other information (do you need the form? do you need something else?) before the option of, if you're in the right place, click here to begin. I think ultimately, it works quite well.
I do see it from both sides, definitely. It’s just as a frequent user, it gets in the way. Once you understand what the form does, you don’t really need to be told every time.
This is good news, but aren't well-phrased questions a strong suit of Gov.uk forms? Other government departments might not be familiar with proper guidelines for form creation. Has this issue been approached? (curious, as I'm not British)
The passport application form[1], for instance, is smooth and well-designed, and the questions are well-written - a good example of the Government Digital Service's excellent design and solid implementation. Perhaps the only downside is the rather disconcerting photograph evaluation tool that suggested to me that my photograph was 'invalid' due to being 'in black-and-white', somehow missing my blue chequered shirt. The whole of the Gov.UK site loads very quickly for me, which is an additional benefit of the focus on accessibility. You can 'view source' on your Web browser and see the very comprehensive metadata, both as JSON-LD and traditional tags.
The 'Universal Credit service'[2] (the recent social welfare system), however, was seemingly not developed by the Government Digital Service, and it shows! It is still marked as 'Beta' years after release, uses a shockingly insecure authentication for sensitive personal data, and has a video conferencing system that can't show video. To top it all off, they very politely request feedback... but provide no feedback form.
I think that illustrates well how easy it is for an excellent toolkit to be abused in the hands of the incompetent or the underfunded, not that the latter is likely to apply in this case[3]! I hope this provides some context related to your question.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport
[2]: https://www.universal-credit.service.gov.uk/sign-in
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit#Implementatio...
When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains. GOV.UK was a breath of fresh air with its simple, consistent UI, served as static HTML. This is how internet services should look like.
The design, look and feel is great. Authenticating / proving your identity on the other hand is lacking: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login/proving-your-... Meanwhile, at least in some EU countries, you can authenticate using your identity card and USB smartcard reader.
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I'm not sure using Google Analytics qualifies as an "externality" but even if it does the UK government has proven time and time again it doesn't give a damn about anyone's privacy, so what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for privacy? Because it would certainly be worse from a technical standpoint.
> what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for privacy? Well, it's a personal value judgement what is "better" of course, but for me being British, I see my government as having some legitimate interest in what I am doing, especially when transacting with them. On the other hand, a gargantuan for-profit American corporation that enriches it's shareholders and was once run by Eric Schmidt, whose l…
I’d rather have my government doing web analytics than some faceless corporation from across the globe.
Might be of course different for people in totalitarian regimes - but as far as I am concerned I still can vote on ones in my country.
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The conditions in the disclaimer only apply to the French government. Translated with Firefox (which apparently still makes some typos): > Conditions for the use of the Components by the Other Users > All Other Users are allowed to use the source code according to the terms of the MIT license. > Other Users are expressly reminded that any use of the Components outside the limits referred to herein or for the purpose…
> Prohibited Use Outside Government Websites It explicitly states it's forbidden to be used by private actors.
When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains. GOV.UK was a breath of fresh air with its simple, consistent UI, served as static HTML. This is how internet services should look like.
When I was living in the UK I thought so to, but when I moved to another country (Poland) I realised 3 huge shortcoming of the UK's online gov system (perhaps they fixed it by now, I moved 6 years ago). These were: a unified way to authenticate oneself to all gov services, a way to sign electronic forms/documents in a legally binding way without having to buy a personal certificate and a establishing a standard "docu…
From what I saw, their legal and bureaucratic systems are geared to try to authenticate everything via physical means, be it signatures (that are supposed to be unique and not just an expression of intent), wet stamps, or (recently) digital signatures. On the contrary, UK works on trust and its legal systems, so you can (theoretically) sign a large money contract with a cross on a napkin, you can open a bank account with a letter from a "a person of good standing in their community" without ever holding a government issued ID, and you can sign contracts with a simple checkbox.
I really enjoy the latter. It's a bit messier, but also feels more humane.
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It's the HTML forms that are good and Angular, React and all that which are bad.
I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.