@ChrisMayLA6 They have a bunch of neat things, including a Markdown superset that includes a bunch of semantic additions for things like addresses and so on that make it easy to build stuff on their infrastructure that works with accessibility features of browsers. I’m not often impressed by government IT projects, but .gov.uk is a really nice piece of work.
have rubbish broadband connections (or none at all)
The gov.uk team has done phenomenal work to make their infrastructure work well on low bandwidth links. I tried some of their sites using a simulated 28.8 Kb/s link with 2s latency and they were quite usable (TLS handshake was very slow). So I don’t necessarily agree with that part of the criticism (it’s almost certainly true for people not using that infrastructure), but the social aspects are spot on. Especially people not having access to trustworthy client devices.
EDIT: I picked 2s latency because that’s what I got on the first phone I owned that supported Internet access. It used GPRS. There is still one GPRS network active, being paid a lot of money to keep smart meters working, but I don’t think they sell to consumers. Mobile Internet will have both faster speeds and lower latency than I tested, but I wanted to see the worst case. And TLS with multiple round trips for the handshake is really slow on that link.
aha, thanks for that; I was unaware they'd done that work; thanks for the corrective & boosted
@ChrisMayLA6 They have a bunch of neat things, including a Markdown superset that includes a bunch of semantic additions for things like addresses and so on that make it easy to build stuff on their infrastructure that works with accessibility features of browsers. I’m not often impressed by government IT projects, but .gov.uk is a really nice piece of work.
@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 Is there a spec for that markdown variant?
@david_chisnall
This is impressive - I have used some gov.uk websites for work and research for work and found them to be excellent and usable.
A shame that this doesn't extend to tfl.gov.uk - particularly if you are not currently in the UK or have a current UK address, but is another story.
There's a lot of things that UK public service does very well, and this is one.
@ChrisMayLA6
Oh, the TFL web site is so frustrating! It's so very nearly good, but misses in some awful ways.
Some of this is due to something I learned recently: The London Underground is a rail network, not a metro network (if I have the terminology correct). The difference is that rail networks are timetabled, whereas metros are scheduled on frequency. This means that TfL can't answer the question I care about, which is 'roughly how long does it take to get from A to B and what's the best route?' without knowing my time of travel quite precisely.
@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 Is this #OpenSource ? Is there public documentation somewhere from which an open source implementation could be built?
I'm a *huge* fan of #Markdown as a way of enabling non-geeks to write good web pages, and good, clearly thought out, well designed extensions to it can only be a good thing.
It is! It's called Govspeak and they have a Ruby implementation that's open source.
@david_chisnall @ChrisMayLA6 Thank you!
License is similar to BSD -- i.e. very open.
Github here: https://github.com/alphagov/govspeak
Online processor here: https://govspeak-preview.publishing.service.gov.uk/
Documentation here: https://govspeak-preview.publishing.service.gov.uk/guide
