Ctr+F "javascript" -- no results. Hmm, if a government website necessitates the use of JavaScript, I'd consider that a hallmark of being awful.
Anyone browsing the internet without it at this point is doing it intentionally to be special.
(I think I got it off a BOFH excuse calendar.)
> You should not assume the reason for designing a service that works without CSS or JavaScript is because a user chooses to switch these off.
> There are many situations when extra layers can fail to load or are filtered, for example:
https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progres...
> It’s important to understand that it’s often not the conscious choice of users to arrive at your site without JavaScript. We did some research and discovered that 0.9% GOV.UK visits are by people who don’t have JavaScript available and haven’t chosen to turn it off.
Some forms and many parts of a government website can indeed be done without JS and should at the very least be done with server side rendering to minimise the usage of JS as much as possible. But large parts of a “modern” government website will typically require some JS in order to operate properly.
For example, it's common for govt forms to have sections like "fill this part in if you're a resident" and "fill this part in if you're a visitor".
Elsewhere in this thread, auto-saving is mentioned, trivial to do with javascript, (and more privacy respecting to do if using local storage.) The alternative is "one page per question" - which is the slowest way possible to fill out a form (and not inconsequentially puts the highest load on the server.)
JavaScript is part of the web, and offers significant UI and work-flow advantages. Govt (or indeed any site) that eschews it is unnecessarily degrading the experience for the vast majority because some sliver of the audience don't like it.
Governments often have complicated forms that need to cater for a broad range of users. So you need things like conditioning steps, file uploads and progress saving.
Have fun doing that in pure HTML and CSS.
The complexity of government forms is not about fancy custom dialogs, elaborate data types or cute animations. There are usually a lot of (simple) questions. Yes/no, checkboxes, dates and times, free fields. The list is not endless.
These forms needs to be frustration free as possible. IME all easy targets if you don’t use JS.
For example when paying for tax free childcare you have to enter a date for when you want the payment to go out. Not only is the date picker just three edit boxes (no "tomorrow" button for example), but it isn't validated at all so if you put in today's date (quite reasonable) and click next it will only tell you on the next page that you can't use today.
It would be much better if a tiny bit of JavaScript told you as soon as you put the date in, and if it had a "tomorrow" button, which would also require some JavaScript.
JavaScript was invented for a reason!
There's so much research that shows the opposite.
You might prefer that but government websites need to work for everyone, and showing validation messages automatically confuses less technically able people, and it's really hard to make it fully accessible.
At which point do you announce the mistake to a screen reader? Where do you shift focus? etc.
It was designed this way for a specific reason. Services that feel the need to extend or change it do have the option to though.
Care to link it? It should be easy to do, if there's so much of it.
There is a standard for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
But I would suggest just having the validation in addition to the current behaviour.
> Where do you shift focus?
You don't?
> There's so much research that shows the opposite.
There's research that shows that a "tomorrow" button is bad??
That client side validation isn't always accessible.
More info here:
> When to tell the user about validation errors
> Do not validate when the user moves away from a field. Wait until they try to move to the next part of the service - usually by clicking the ‘continue’ or ‘submit’ button at the bottom of the page.
Yeah the character count is a bit of a special case because reaching the limit without going over would be very inconvenient.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/
(I'm aware the design system has a sprinkling of JS, but it offers a few in-page enhancements and works just fine without)