Love what we’ve said? Think we’re talking nonsense? Don’t worry about being polite, just let us have it. We’re not afraid of telling you that you’re talking crap, so don’t be afraid of telling us the same.
Progressive enhancement, my arse!
It’s always exciting to see a new government website brought to fruition, especially when that site adheres to web standards, is accessible, and uses valid, semantic code.
Imagine my joy, therefore, when I heard about “a dynamic new government-backed service” whose accessibility page boasts that:
This website has been created with valid XHTML (Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and adheres to (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. Additionally the site meets with Bobby approved Conformance Level AA in association with the Web Content Guidelines.
That site is www.supply2.gov.uk
Nice. Or it would be if it wasn’t a usability nightmare and if the functional pages could live up to that fine boast.
Honestly. What were they thinking?
The homepage has an h2 followed immediately by an h7 - an h7! Not only are they skipping 5 levels of semantic structure, they’re inventing tags at the same time!
I’m searching for a word to describe the authors of this code, but all I can conjure up is mental images of the wide open plains of the american midwest and weather-worn men herding vast numbers of cattle…
Supply2.gov.uk is a dynamic new government-backed service designed specifically to give companies easy access to lower-value contract opportunities (typically worth under £100,000) offered by the public sector.
The Supply2.gov.uk Portal was launched by Jim Fitzpatrick, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department of Trade & Industry on Tuesday 27 June 2006.
I bet Jim Fitzpatrick didn’t visit the site without javascript enabled though.
Nice. That will be “graceful degradation” at work then.
This is exactly the kind of thing that makes my blood boil. We do a reasonable number of government contracts at Cimex, so this could be a really useful resource, but why oh why was a third-party supplier paid by that same government gravy train to produce this tosh? It hurts my eyes and the code makes me want to punch pensioners, and my tax money has paid for it!
I think I’d better go and lie down in a darkened room for a bit…