We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms • Hacker News Board

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#191

Post by ksec » Sun, Oct 08, 2023, 3:19 AM UTC

46Bit wrote: post #43

nonrandomstring wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too. However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common…

Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app. (I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

>(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

If you could tell, why did you leave?

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#192

Post by manonthewall » Sun, Oct 08, 2023, 6:18 AM UTC

meindnoch wrote: post #21

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 My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains.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.

There is so much to be said for KISS, especially when you have to do an interface for "everyone" and not just a bunch of tech-savvy STEM people

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#193

Post by manonthewall » Sun, Oct 08, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

azangru wrote: post #22

colesantiago wrote: post #13

I wish all websites were as good as GOV.UK's, they should be taught in schools, colleges and computer science / web courses as the gold standard in web design. No frills or silly scroll jacking animations plus javascript hogging contraptions that we see in almost all websites these days. This gives me hope.

> No frills or silly scroll jacking animations plus javascript hogging contraptions that we see in almost all websites these days. Still the cookie warnings though :-( I've just visited on my phone the forms page linked in the title, and the first thing that greeted me was a full-screen page-blocking dialog with some cookie nonsense. You can't interact with the contents of the page until you decide how you feel about…

conent-o-matic works there

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#194

Post by nonrandomstring » Sun, Oct 08, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

djhn wrote: post #168

nonrandomstring wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and bring even more things properly back in-house. Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government…

Sold parts of GCHQ? Could you elaborate? That sounds rather bad.

Some but not all of it run-of-the-mill corruption from the usual suspects like Priti Patel. There's not much of Britain left to sell to private equity and Big Tech, but they're always working on finding new "markets".

https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90...

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-brit...

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#195

Post by mtillman » Tue, Oct 10, 2023, 4:08 AM UTC

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #135

mtillman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process and the results are cameras that don’t work to the point of the officials needing to manually adjust them, forms that don’t contain consistent data across pages, and my favorite “save a photo of the confirm just in case lah.” The old system just worked, the new system insists upon APPs.

> Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process Source? I've lived in Singapore all my life and have not heard of this. There was an outage on the 31st of March[1], and parliamentary discussion after that[2] doesn't mention any of what you said. [1]: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-ter... [2]: https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral…

“Recently” is admittedly subjective but I was just there (2 times in 3 weeks) and can confirm it’s a new system to 4 years ago when the foreign passes were all paper. I think it’s called Tacent. It was so bad a local woman couldn’t even get in and they had to have her wait in the foreign line. You can simply visit the existing immigration website, as it’s public, to view the inconsistent data-the same forms that are displayed on their iPads in the reception hall. This wasn’t an outage, just poor technology implementation.