Govt. web sites are crap: Official

[The Lone Gunman]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4853000.stm

From the BBC. at least 60% of Govt. and Council home pages have errors or are innaccessible.

Thats what comes of outsourcing to the wrong people.

I particularly liked this bit

One difficulty is that many authoring tools do not generate compliant HTML and make it difficult to edit the coding.

So some numpty using dreamweaver is authoring their web sites instead of web professionals then?

[threaded]

Of course! IT is considered a clerical task after all.

By people who know fsck all about IT.

HTH

[The Lone Gunman]

Ironically I'm working on an "e-government" CMS (for NHS, councils etc) which will stop those dreamweaver rapists dead.

It uses XStandard XHTML editor and won't even load a page until it's correctly written. It's also semantically correct XHTML so you can view the page on ANYTHING without having to click a text version link or mobile version or that crap.

Not only that I'm giving it away for free! (unless you want support, for which I will be charging a small fortune but still less than the big boys).

Did I hear that correctly? "giving it away"? You should be ashamed of yourself, this is a contractors board. Some of the older or insecure members will not be able to venture out for days if you insist on using language like that.

[zathras]

companies have to pay for it

That means all contractors will have to pay for it as we all (most) have to work via a limited company!

PS Got a link thingy

[Mailman]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4853000.stm

From the BBC. at least 60% of Govt. and Council home pages have errors or are innaccessible.

And the other 40% are just absolute dogs bollocks! So poorly designed as to make them completely useless!

Mailman

[The Lone Gunman]

And the other 40% are just absolute dogs bollocks! So poorly designed as to make them completely useless!

Mailman

FYI the term "The Dogs Bollocks" is used in the UK to denote the best or the pinnacle, the supreme. Bollocks used on its own means rubbish or useless, the worst.

HTH

[Joe Black]

I will say that this is NOT some piece of amateur PHP tulip! It's got about 5 years of my time invested in it. The classic ASP version from yonks ago is running here: http://www.wastecycle.co.uk/ .. albeit customised by muppets (not myself). New one looks more NHS-ish and feels like ASP.Net which it is.

I would hope that the 'feels like .Net' version provides better linking than "http://www.wastecycle.co.uk/?c=1054&ch=1" for every single page...

[mcquiggd]

Erm, me and a 2-3 day a week XML expert built a system to perform content management for Her Majestys Stationery Office, delivering content to various outfits such as the Statutory Publications Office, and published output as diverse as Winston Churchills diaries and the Highway Code in 9 months.... integrated with XMetal, purely xml based internally, output chunked (paged for web sites, paged differently for print), linked, delayed / immediate delivery depending on the SLA the client had paid for.... supported binary data, automatic image resizing and conversion to different formats, no spec and written from scratch.

5 years to develop a CMS...????

[mcquiggd]

Erm, so was the system we developed - written to publish the Acts of Parliament and Statutory Instruments that are the Law.

I wouldnt exactly classify the processing and distribution of Hansard and the Budget to the Statutory Publications Office and numerous other agencies as simply an 'editing platform'... as for running the BBC, I think you should read their article regarding the development of the backend for publishing the website - it certainly didnt take 5 years to develop and involved around 10 people...

Why would I want to build a database 'access style on the web'...?