In article , charles scribeth thus
Do you ever get the feeling that no one else wants the job?..
SWMBO's mum is a Mayoress in the French town where they live shes been doing the job for years and I really can't understand why. Shes not a control freak or anything like that shes in fact a very pleasant MIL.
But she carries all the grief of the place no bugger is at all happy there, they all are grumbling about something or other!.
Just seems to be no pleasing them...
In message , Andrew Mawson writes
Nothing surprises me when it comes to gov gateway
Especially when they shut the relevant bit down on the 5th April (end of the financial year) for "Routine maintenance" so when you've rushed to get everything finished and ready to transmit ... you can't
A few years ago in Whitby we had fewer candidates than seats:
(I would have stood myself, but I live outside the 3-mile limit)
JGH
By and large, yes. The standards contain plenty enough stuff to allow decent web sites to be made up which can be accessed by all mainstream browsers, because for the most part browsers all implement the standard stuff. So there's no excuse for making a site that *doesn't* follow the standards.
But the usual suspect decided to implement its own extensions in some areas which some people, because they couldn't be arsed to *think*, have used in the sites in question.
I don't have, and won't have, and indeed can't have, that suspect's browser because it doesn't run on my platform.
I remember testing the .gov.uk site with over 150 different browser for display. The forms on that site are also fully compliant. But I believe in this case the user was linked to from .gov.uk and was a different site.
W3C compliance does not mean some areas will work and indeed some manufacturers will deliberately skip over the functionality in favour of their own software specific addons or try to influence the W3C rules.
The rules are also far behind on the cutting edge sites so much functionality which people expect have no real rules to follow.
I suspect that form has been designed to work with over 100 different types of mobile phone. Getting used to captials as different characters is logical and second nature to anyone who has moved away from Microshaft. But in the scheme of things it does not sounds like a major problem, but a bug which they are probably paying a lot of money to get teh contractors to look into.
Yes, but there are standards and real life.
I'd expect a decent web site engineer to be testing against several recent versions of firefox, opera, chrome and safari, and against IE back to V8. Where applicable not just on PC platforms, but on Mac and Linux, and with more than one processor type (so X64, X86, PPC, ARM) and different versions of the OS (Mountain Lion, Leopard, whatever - Windows back to XP).
It's pretty apparent though that many web sites aren't produced by a decent engineering team.
Andy
Yer we used to test for those and trust me that is a small and very basic list you have written there. But being a gov site we needed to be compliant to IE4, and that was dropped about 3 years ago upto IE6. Yes you even have to be that far back.
Then building the site is less than half of the work. The testing phases to find every little tiny nuance which may or may not be considered good has to be found. Small changes in a site can have strange consequences elsewhere.
Then of course the client (civil servants) are expected to to User Acceptance Test it but that tends to be skipped over and then still blame the engineers for not spotting the errors.
The only exception is that these site are never compliant to the latest and greatest tech which you listed. It can take a year + to update a site and it is safe to assume backwards compatibility. Except when a manufacturer are trying to push there latest kit and browser.
Anyone who says to me the search engine should be more "gogglelike" just shoot them and walk away :-)
If you check out W3C compliance in detail you will find that none are fully compliant, but IE9 comes closest. Hence, it may well be possible to write a fully compliant site, but find that there are bits of it that don't work with some browsers.
However, the real problem for a government site is that it has to expect attempts to hack it and it has to be able to resist those attempts. Therefore, it will need to be tested in depth before being released, which costs money and takes time, usually quite a lot of time. They simply can't keep up with the latest, or even the slightly out of date, trends in computing the way some people seem to think they should.
Colin Bignell
Whose measurement do you pick? caniuse.com acidtests.org w3c-test.org
They vary in what parts of they specs they test.
The problem with IE9 is that it can't run on WinXP
That's why they should be KISS. Surely most people are visiting a government website to get or send information they are not there a "great visitor experience". Stick to basic HTML, no flash, no javascript and about the only difference you'll get between browsers are slight rendering variations, all the content will be visible and all the links work.
Or on any version of OS X.
If possible, I so agree.
Partner is webmistress for a site and 99% just works regardless of browser - including all the various mobile products. There are sometimes subtle differences such as where text wraps within a label/box - but simplicity being the watchword, not very many. And she always tries to address issues which do occur with an approach which will work on all browsers.
The last stupidity was that site owner desperately wanted rounded corners on boxes, an absolute "MUST HAVE NOW!!!" - they were duly implemented, and work on every browser tested except IE8 and earlier. (If they do not work on any others - then nobody has reported the issue. :-) ) Site owner is still using IE8 and putting up with square corners on her own PC...
On Monday 22 April 2013 08:36 Dave Liquorice wrote in uk.d-i-y:
The car tax website is pretty basic - and it works.
However, when I tried to buy a copy of a title plan from the Land Registry, I had to reegister (why??) then the registration process blew up with a weird error code that said "call the helpdesk".
Why can they not just do a simple "take payment" and even offer Paypal or Google Checkout???
On Monday 22 April 2013 08:51 polygonum wrote in uk.d-i-y:
Our school built a new site and used
I don't think he'd thought of that, but was very pleased when he took it in.
Quite a refreshing experience...
[1] And no, nothing else but a simple specialised CMS would work. This way, they have the school bursar and teachers designing and updating it which means the info is actually upto date :)
In some ways a CMS would have made sense for the site my partner webmistresses. But we ended up realising quite how incapable some people were of doing even that. Just have to read some of the requests for updates which make no sense but could have been implemented without thought.
When the site owner was discussing the re-development to its current state, she visited lots of vast CMS sites operated by large organisations. And kept asking for things that are necessary (and feasible) in them, but not in a small scale, non-CMS site. For example, having umpteen landing pages which added nothing. Made me look at some such sites and despair of the ridiculous excesses they are capable of producing.
+1 A paragon of effective simplicity!
EON are our energy suppliers, and I mailed them last week complimenting them on their website (and other communications): "they bring a tear to my eye" I said: simple, lucid, to the point (applies to the _design_, as well as the _content_).
I used to be an information officer in the world of computing: sites like EON's and the DVLA Road Tax website are exactly what I used to hope we'd produce (but usually buggered up by the designers, coders, or the bosses, who all wanted to do flashy things [no pun]).
John
If web designers followed W3C standards, then a lot of accessibility software works very well. Which makes it even more anti-social not to design to standards.
I'm glad someone other than me has come across this - I found on the same website that any letters after "P" in the alphabet weren't capable of being entered. And also got the same response from their helpdesk.
Despite the fact that Chrome now accounts for about 50% of the browser usage...
Mind you, even when I used IE instead to access that website, it still fell over every time I wanted to get a statement. So I had to do it on the phone instead.
Matt
I thought this was mostly a thing of the past. Although VWV/3DS doesn't work on any computer/browser for me.
Very rarely now see "Best viewed in " - and when I do, it is usually a site that has not been maintained for years.
As for so very, very long, it is Flash which causes more problems than anything else. Willing to accept it for some things, it is when it is used where there is no need, it adds nothing, and there is no alternative - you have to wonder at sites which want your traffic then fail to retain your interest and, indeed, piss you off.
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