18 ms·

Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF

541 points by edent 8y ago

kqr 8y ago
One of the hardest things I remember from my time as a web consultant was explaining to my customers why PDF is not a suitable replacement for HTML. They always tried to replace half of their pages with pdf documents...
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  PDF is easy to create from a Word document, try using Word to create HTML and you get a dogs dinner. If our industry was better at creating tools for ordinary users to create HTML then the problem would solve itself.
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    The issue is that people want a frozen format so they can line up images precisely where they want them to be. This is antithetical to displaying things in a browser. Sure, it can be done, but it's CSS that's fighting the browser. What we really should have done for our governments is figured out the 20 or so essential layouts and pre-coded CSS for them, but always allowed the government to fallback to custom HTML / CSS.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      Never mind that shifting one of them produces a cascade of changes that leads to some office worker spending a fruitful hour lining them all up again for version two...
      - kqr 8y ago
        This is one of the reasons I strongly prefer text-based/command-line interfaces: they're always scriptable. In the worst case you'll just generate a bunch of commands that'd take a human forever to execute.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    This. Documents are generally created and laid out for print and email distribution and often have very carefully laid out data tables, charts and page number referencing (as well as less important cosmetic formatting). Simply changing the file format isn't going to solve the accessibility problems and is going to create new formatting/compatibility issues, and and changing the workflow of every member of the civil service to require them to use an accessible HTML generation tool in place of word processors for anything that might be later made public isn't a trivial undertaking either. Said accessible HTML generation tool is probably going to want to change those nice HTML files back to PDF or Word files for restricted email distribution too...
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Pandoc already exists, it's just difficult to use. You can write everything in Markdown and export to your org's Word template and have HTML, LaTeX, etc. export.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      I really like markdown but I doubt it's the answer to this. These people aren't programmers, most of them will only have a loose grasp of what a file format is. What they need are tools that don't require a programming background.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement? Yes, but it's not a fully ACCESSIBLE document, which is half of the point of the article.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    HTML is easy. CSS is hard. CSS is hard partly because it's a mess, but mostly because designing for the web is hard. Normal human beings understand pages, in the papery sense of the word. They don't understand viewports. It takes an enormous leap of abstraction to reason about a document that could be any shape or size. Responsive design is a fundamentally unintuitive process. A lot of professional designers fail to understand this, even after years of designing for the web.
- Spivak 8y ago
  Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement? * If your internal workflow is designing documents then the conversion to a web document will be clunky at best. * Every end-user device has a PDF reader and their web browser probably opens it transparently. * You need the PDF either way way because the website will never be the authoritative source so now you have the problem of making sure they don't get out of sync. * You probably have a few internal graphic designers that can do wonders with print but it's unlikely you have an internal web development team. * It's much easier to make a PDF accessible than a website. (Before you disagree remember that the offices we're talking about likely don't have a dedicated web designer) You can be sure it will print correctly, and for most users it's automatically offline.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Trying to read a PDF on a mobile device is usually painful.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      Sure, but that's because mobile devices have really small screens. You could create PDFs that were meant to be viewed at that size, but why? You'd have the same problem trying to read a regular book through a mobile-phone-sized window. That doesn't make books an unsuitable vehicle for document delivery.
      - vidarh 8y ago
        It does make it an unsuitable vehicle for delivery of information which people may want to access from a mobile device, however.
        thaumasiotes 8y ago
        Not at all; there is no information that people won't want to access from a mobile device. But again, a mobile device is not necessarily suitable for the job.
osrec 8y ago
Having interacted with a number of government websites, I have to say the UK government does an excellent job of theirs. Most things are simple to understand and clearly presented. Even though I only use it for the the most mundane of things, using it is generally a very pleasant experience!
- mattmanser 8y ago
  Yeah, it's been a real turn around, used to be awful. My only complaint is that they're sometimes too dogmatic about the one question per page thing, which is actually a pretty stupid UX commandment as soon as you get to complex logic flows. I think they've relaxed a bit on that though, I didn't notice it last time I was doing my company tax return.
  - Balero 8y ago
    They do have to make the site usable by everyone including the non-tech savvy, I can definitely see good reasons for keeping the input extremely limited. One of the "downsides" of it being a government site is that it needs to be usable for everyone. Which can be a bit frustrating for power users.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      They could add a single-page view. It's not very hard to automatically generate single-page and multi-page views of the same form.
      - williamdclt 8y ago
        Not necessarily easy either, and I don't really see the point. It's perfectly usable as it is, might as well keep it simple and invest time/money in stuff more useful than satisfying the .5% of users that are techy (made up number) for the few times a year they have to use the website
        mattmanser 8y ago
CJefferson 8y ago
This is good. One of the biggest (in my opinion) failures of accessibility in academia is that everything is published as PDFs generated from latex, which is THE least accessable format in existence (word's PDFs are fine, so it is Latex's fault they are so bad). Some people provide their latex, which improves matters, but most people don't.
- detaro 8y ago
  What's inaccessible about LaTeX-generated PDF?
  - fyfy18 8y ago
    Good luck reading a scientific paper on your phone without lots of zooming and scrolling around.
    - detaro 8y ago
      And that's somehow better in Word-generated scientific papers?
      - CJefferson 8y ago
        Actually, word produces PDFs which contain markup for screen readers, which make them much more accessible to blind people.
    - thanatropism 8y ago
      Good luck reading a scientific paper on your phone period. Many journals are now making available the full text of papers in straight HTML (possibly only for users of participant libraries, I don't know) but that still sucks. I mean, it's a small screen.
  - dubya 8y ago
    It used to be a problem that you couldn't cut and paste text from TeX-generated PDFs, and I assume this would be a problem for screen readers. I think the dvi->pdf conversion produced a PDF consisting mostly of coordinates and characters (in a non-standard encoding), which PDF readers couldn't put back together into words. This seems mostly fixed on recent pdfs, but I don't know if it's TeX (pdflatex?) or the readers that have gotten smarter. Funnily, Donald Knuth's AoCP fascicles ship as postscript files, which Preview.app converts to PDFs that can't be copied from.
pmontra 8y ago
PDF is easier for some authors: write in Word, export as PDF, mail to somebody who will upload to the web server and maybe print it for non digital distribution. Web CMS were invented (among many other reasons) to let non technical people write and edit content directly inside the browser and publish it. I wonder if gov.uk doesn't have a CMS or their authors don't want to use it.
- petepete 8y ago
  The gov.uk folks make heavy use of Markdown, and so they should - the sooner we leave this PDF/Word doc nonsense in the past the better. HTML in the browser is the best tool for consuming documents; we can read and write on any device, bookmark documents or chapter headings, resize and style at will in a device independent manner, enhance documents and make them interactive[1], even add videos if required. The best part is that the source is all stored in plain text and is version controlled without requiring Sharepoint or similar. [0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/markdown https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/markdow... [1] https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html-publications-new-feature/ https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html...
spystath 8y ago
I don't understand why these should be mutually exclusive. Starting from a common parseable markup you can have both responsive HTML for browsers and formatted PDF for print. Why don't decouple content from presentation?
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  If the HTML is responsive, why can't it be good for print? And, for the sake of reducing waste, should we not discourage people from printing in the first place?
  - masklinn 8y ago
    You'd probably want a dedicated print CSS to remove various bits of UI and decoration, as well as styling which works well on a screen but is terrible in print (e.g. the white-on-black and white-on-blue headers). However gov.uk already does both so it's not an actual issue here.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    I do a lot of lit review. Having hard pagination and consisstent layout is, for me, a cognitive gain, esspeciially for longer documents, say, 20+ pages. (I frequently read 500+ page docs.) Other formats such as ePub are frequntly compact in space utiisaation, but again, the free-flowing text lacks the mnemonic framing of even a basic print book, let alone the expertise of a masterpiece of layout & typography such as Tufte. Not that HTML isn't well-suited to other cases, or that PDFs can't be awful. But there's a place.
- stilley2 8y ago
  This is what I do with my CV. I just keep a markdown file up to date and can quickly generate PDF and HTML versions.
_bxg1 8y ago
I listened to a talk at a web development conference from one of the UK government's accessibility developers. Among other things, they do extensive accessibility testing and discovered things you wouldn't expect. For example, to people who didn't grow up with them, dropdown boxes are apparently unintuitive, so gov.uk avoids them. I was very impressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Mj7_0Lok0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Mj7_0Lok0
- _bxg1 8y ago
  I just realized, they cut out all the actual user videos in the video posted to YouTube... So that's unfortunate, but it's still a good talk.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I find irony in the fact that this is a YouTube video with no text transcript, massively reducing its accessibility to both those with disabilities and those who aren't in an environment where they can sit and watch a 20-minute video. Does YouTube have the ability for authors to attach or display a text version of their video?
  - coherentpony 8y ago
    It would be ironic if YouTube were owned by the UK Government. I don't think this particular situation is ironic. I think it's just simply irritating.
    - markovbot 8y ago
      YouTube provides the video uploader with extensive subtitle/CC capabilities, which they did not take advantage of.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    Click the little 'CC' button in the toolbar. Video authors can upload closed captions to videos, or Youtube will autogenerate using voice-to-text which, while isn't perfect, does a decent enough job. Worth noting that this was a presentation at Texas JavaScript Conference, and the presenter likely had nothing to do with the video being uploaded to Youtube.
xchaotic 8y ago
Sadly, the great GDS team that is bringing about the great design/technical change in the UK gov is falling prey to politics from the same people that brought you #brexit. GDS used to be an initiative directly from the Cabinet Office, it has now been moved to the ministry of Culture and Sport. You might think what does sport have to do with gov website UX? But it's all politics - GDS delivered and it is making the other politicians and gov officials look bad so they are being undermined. That's my reading of that anyway - no good deed goes unpunished.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  Actually, once you get the name right, it being the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, it becomes somewhat clearer what it has to do with this WWW site. But this then prompts the question of exactly when "digital" became a noun. (-:
- HowdyPoopy 8y ago
  > ... UK gov is falling prey to politics from the same people that brought you #brexit. Oh do shut up. What has 'Brexit' got to do with this? This is the UK equivalent of turning everything into an excuse to bash Trump/Republicans. > ..That's my reading of that anyway I am sure it is. It isn't anyone else's I expect
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Eh. Portfolio's get shuffled around all the time. I wouldn't look into it too much.
- nextbase 8y ago
  As far as I'm aware, GDS has no plans to move from Cabinet Office (source: I work at GDS).
thanatropism 8y ago
http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/ "If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in (several dialects of) Markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, Creole 1.0, Vimwiki markup, OPML, Emacs Org-Mode, Emacs Muse, txt2tags, Microsoft Word docx, LibreOffice ODT, EPUB, or Haddock markup to HTML formats XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, reveal.js, Slideous, S5, or DZSlides Word processor formats Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML, Microsoft PowerPoint. Ebooks EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2 Documentation formats DocBook version 4 or 5, TEI Simple, GNU TexInfo, Groff man, Groff ms, Haddock markup Archival formats JATS Page layout formats InDesign ICML Outline formats OPML TeX formats LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides PDF via pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, pdfroff, wkhtml2pdf, prince, or weasyprint. Lightweight markup formats Markdown (including CommonMark and GitHub-flavored Markdown), reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, Emacs Org-Mode, Emacs Muse, Textile, txt2tags, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, TWiki markup, Vimwiki markup, and ZimWiki markup. Custom formats custom writers can be written in lua."
- tjoff 8y ago
  You can not have PDF as an input format in pandoc. PDF is terrible because you can not easily/sensibly even parse the text. That also means it is hard to diff two versions and see the differences.
  - oever 8y ago
    "Tagged" PDF files allow text extraction. Tagged PDF is often required for accessibility. Screen readers for the blind should be able to extract the text. This is possible with Tagged PDF. PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b are tagged PDF and required PDF formats in some governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Logical_structure_and_accessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Logical_structure_and_acce...
IanCal 8y ago
I'd love to have a format that is just HTML + whatever zipped up that browsers and operating systems happily just open in a browser. I like making HTML reports (rmarkdown), but sharing them requires telling people to download then open them in a browser. Google drive, for example, happily just shows you a preview but then if you click on the file you get raw html. Customers just don't understand. PDF however, is absolutely fine to move around as a single chunk, but has problems in almost every other way.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > I'd love to have a format that is just HTML + whatever zipped up that browsers and operating systems happily just open in a browser. There is MHTML, sadly it fails the second bit because AFAIK Chrome dropped its support and FF and Safari can't open it natively. Apple has its own WebArchive format, and Firefox's MAF extension generated MAFF file but is not compatible with newer versions.
  - ksec 8y ago
    At one point in time, I thought MHTML was precisely what we need to get rid of PDF, double click, and everything works. Sadly everyone abandoned it, and Google doesn't want you to have down any webpage for archiving purpose.
  - oftenwrong 8y ago
    Chrome supports MHTML as an experimental feature. Visit chrome://flags/#save-page-as-mhtml in Chrome to enable it. I wish there was an agreed-upon standard format that had cross-browser support.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  File > Save As... > Web Archive
  - IanCal 8y ago
    I don't think you read the comment. That, in chrome, generates an html file and another folder. I would need to tell users to download the html file, download the folder, put them in the same place and open it in chrome. If I put it on google drive to share it, they'll just be shown raw html unless they then download and open it. I also tested it on a page using chrome and it didn't properly load the pictures.
Y_Y 8y ago
On a related note, I have to fill out a PDF form to make a GDPR complaint to the Data Commissioner (in Ireland). This is a plain-text form, the information could just as easily be sent in the body of an email. Using PDF means having to deal with crappy PDF software, hurting accessibility and scriptability and adding needless overhead on the other end. I wish these systems were designed by sane and benevolent programmers, rather than Pointy Haired Bureaucrats. ( https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/raise-a-concern-Form/m/1727.htm https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/raise-a-concern-Form/m/17... )
- crtasm 8y ago
  That's bad but small silver lining is that it's not a word document that silently renders incorrectly in other editors so you don't even see some of the fields.
Aaargh20318 8y ago
The problem with HTML is that it's not a stable format. Will a browser in 2028 be able to render those pages correctly ? What about 2038 ? If the content needs to be available for a longer time PDF/A would be a much better choice than HTML.
- detaro 8y ago
  What HTML + CSS from 1998 doesn't render usefully anymore?
  - xeromal 8y ago
    Marquee
    - detaro 8y ago
      Is actually still supported by many browsers, and never was actually part of a HTML spec (it's only mentioned in HTML5, and marked as deprecated there). Even where it isn't, the contents likely are still visible (same with blink, which is is supported in fewer browsers as far as I know, and also never was in an HTML spec)
  - Aaargh20318 8y ago
    What HTML + CSS from 1998 renders in exactly the same way (pixel perfect copy) on a modern browser as it did on a browser in 1998 ?
    - detaro 8y ago
      Notice how I specified "renders usefully". Few documents have to be pixel perfect, even fairly old HTML had tools to make individual parts where it might be more important pixel perfect, and given the higher level of standardization and standards compliance nowadays this would likely be better for documents created today.
- thewarpaint 8y ago
  Your browser should be completely able to render the first webpage ever created, from the early 1990s: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
Steve44 8y ago
I can see for dynamic information PDF definitely has limitations but a lot of what I get from gov.uk I feel is better in PDF. The web pages are fine for navigation and overviews but for hard information I much prefer a PDF. A PDF document can be dated and versioned, you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document. You can then download a newer one if you want, the older version is still available and largely immutable. Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > A PDF document can be dated and versioned, you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document. You can then download a newer one if you want, the older version is still available and largely immutable. Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder. How is it any let alone a lot harder? Save a timestamped copy of the file. Save it as a web archive if you fear assets depletion. Hell, pretty much every platform lets you save pages as PDFs natively, good luck doing the opposite.
  - CGamesPlay 8y ago
    Many pages don’t render correctly when printed to PDF (it’s easy to accidentally make your page entirely illegible after printing), and most pages that rely on JavaScript completely fail to operate when saved as a web archive. So saving pages is, in my experience, quite a crapshoot.
    - mjevans 8y ago
      In addition to that point /static/ content on websites can be easily cached. Want to have a forum as an optional /extra/ on an otherwise static page? Maybe OK, but please have a way of getting that forum as a different page (which is updated on some basis, maybe per post, maybe with a cooldown of maximum 1 generation every X or only during low server load, etc).
- throwaway37585 8y ago
  > A PDF document can be dated and versioned So can an HTML page. > you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document... Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder. Right click, save page as... Am I missing something?
aquamo 8y ago
I'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs. Allow the presentation layer to be handled on the end points. Maybe something like markdown will be sufficient. I always look up to the fixed width font model used by IETF RFCs. They are extremely readable and searchable and last for a long time.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs. Someone mentions "blockchain" in 3... 2... 1...
velcrovan 8y ago
This tradeoff between the relative virtues of PDF and HTML is a good argument for looking at Pollen (pollenpub.com) a framework for designing your own markup language that is capable of targeting HTML and PDF (or any output you need: audio, Kindle, whatever). A proof of concept is here: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/ https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/ On every page at that micro-site, you can view the Pollen markup source, or the PDF version. The PDF and the HTML are generated at the same time, from the same source. Another example is my blog The Notepad (https://thenotepad.org/ https://thenotepad.org/). Both sites have links to their source on Github.
- Numberwang 8y ago
  I'm a big fan of asciidoc and quite sad that it didn't take of as a default format for documents.
  - velcrovan 8y ago
    I think what's sad about formats per se is that you rely on toolmakers to implement them, and to decide how to translate them into the target format; and for all toolmakers to support them in ways that are coherent with each other. You also end up with this awkward two-step between the format and the tools. If some capability is missing, you wait for the format to define a way to do it, then the toolmakers to support it; or less ideally, the toolmakers define their own incompatible ways of doing it without waiting for consensus. This covers the problems I have with Markdown. It as wide support, but because vanilla Markdown only covers a 1995-era subset of HTML, there are all kinds of things (footnotes, figures, formatted code blocks etc) that people want it to do. Any given editor or CMS or site generator will support 95% of your preferred flavor's way of doing things and disagree with your other tools about the last 5%. The difference with Pollen is that it isn't a format or a markup specification; it's a programming environment. So you design the markup, and you tell it how to get from the source markup to your target format. The format is yours and the implementation is yours; they are one and the same. It is a bit more work, true, but it's less work in Pollen than it would be in any other environment because it does parsing for you and applies your transformations in a logical, ordered way.
Nursie 8y ago
Gov.uk pages are still using google-analytics and reporting the activities of British Citizens' interactions with their own government to a US-based multinational I see. And the only option to disable is to click through and install a browser add-on to opt-out. This doesn't seem very GDPR-friendly.
- barrucadu 8y ago
  No personally identifying information is sent to Google Analytics. IP addresses are anonymised, email addresses, dates, and postcodes are stripped too. See https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c3fefe6608fc9e82883b09c2307513996f666/docs/analytics.md https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c... and https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c3fefe6608fc9e82883b09c2307513996f666/javascripts/govuk/analytics/analytics.js https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c...
  - Nursie 8y ago
    It's present on every page, and it's loaded from google. Anonymisation is pointless. The fact that they use Piwik on a couple of pages they consider sensitive (usually to do with payment) shows that even gov.uk know this cannot be relied upon to fully hide things. It shouldn't be there and I've raised a complaint with the ICO. Note that the page says that it can be configured to strip all that info, not that it does by default. One would have to look at each page to see how this is configured. And it could still be wrong to switch this on by default, under the GDPR.
    - MaxBarraclough 8y ago
      > Anonymisation is pointless. How's that?
JdeBP 8y ago
> On a responsive website like GOV.UK, content and page elements shift around to suit the size of the user’s device and browser. But they do not, on that very page. I resized the page up to full screen and then back again in a WWW browser and all that happened is that huge areas of whitespace opened and closed around the text, which remained word-wrapped in exactly the same places.
- ghostly_s 8y ago
  Yes, they do. The line width only increases up to a certain maximum because this is usability best-practice; there is an max optimal line length for readability.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    No, they did not. I performed the experiment myself and know what I saw, thank you. If this is a question of my "device" always being above some maximum line length, then clearly this is not suiting the size of the device. It is suiting some guidelines, not the user's device.
    - ghostly_s 8y ago
      Try another browser. I'm telling you it is clearly responsive on mine, and the down-votes are others telling you the same. Now if you're just trying to ret-con the definition of 'responsive design' to grind some personal axe, go do it somewhere relevant.
      - pwg 8y ago
        Actually, I just opened the site in Firefox's "responsive design mode" web-dev tool. The site is responsive up to about 1023 pixels wide, after which it no longer re-flows at all. It just becomes a 1023 pixel wide site inside of a much wider browser window. I think the OP's point was that they wanted the "responsiveness" to not have an upper limit of width. That if (example) they had a 4k monitor that was 2,160 pixels wide, and they maximized the browser window, they wanted the site layout to reflow to use all 2,160 (minus window decorations) of pixel width to lay out content. As it is now, if they had a monitor that wide, the site will only ever use 1,023 pixels of width to lay itself out, leaving large margins of unused space on the sides. [edit]: A bit more research shows this CSS declaration on a <div> with the class of "container": max-width: 964px;. Turning off that one CSS declaration allows the site to widen to fit a maximized browser window.
rekshaw 8y ago
I've worked with gov.uk. They are essentially a startup inside a huge organization, and their great work reflects that. One of the things they told me that struck me: most websites have customers, we have users. What they mean by this is that being a customer implies choice, whereas there is no alternative to .gov.uk, hence users don't have a choice. So it's gov.uk's responsibility to make their website as clear, accessible and useful as possible.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  I think there are some parallels between "just leave (insert technology provider here)" and "just leave the country you call home". > most websites have customers, we have users. Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products? For many people, leaving digitally can have bad effects on their social life. It's arguably not as bad as moving out of the country, but it's still a practically impossible hurdle for a lot of people.
  - rossdavidh 8y ago
    For at least some (perhaps many) businesses (especially small ones), leaving Facebook is not an option. Perhaps even more so for Google.
  - masklinn 8y ago
    > Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products? Advertisers are the customers. Non-advertisers are the product. The goal is not to provide a good service to the product, it's to drive engagement of the product up so customers are happy.
    - augbog 8y ago
      Damn... this hit me hard and makes me realize why corporations can be pretty evil :/... in the back of their minds, they're always thinking of how to please their "true" customers.
gwbas1c 8y ago
I love using PDF to create backups of webpages if I think I'll want to look at it in the future. I generated PDFs as backups for references in college assignments, and it really saved me when pages moved mid-assignment.
Spooky23 8y ago
Overall, decisions like this are compromises, with pros and cons: "They’re not designed for reading on screens" That's a subjective distinction. "It’s harder to track their use" Not relevant for most .gov use cases. Also, sounds like something that isn't a user problem. "They cause difficulties for navigation and orientation" So does responsive design that makes discovery of content difficult in many scenarios, especially atypical scenarios. "They can be hard for some users to access" So does HTML where a poor accessibility process is in place. "They’re less likely to be kept up to date" Conversely, they more easy for a consumer understand when changes take place, and encourage a stronger release process. "They’re hard to reuse" That may or may not be a bad thing.
- allannienhuis 8y ago
  I think the point is: it's harder to do those things properly in PDF format. Also, I'm not sure how 'not designed for reading on screens' is subjective. PDFs are paper-document oriented and don't display well for reading on anything other than a large size monitor in virtually every case I've seen. When delivering content in a web browser, why on earth would someone prefer to view PDF vs a reasonably well laid out HTML version? I think PDFs are common in gov't websites because much of the internal culture is paper-document centred, and having those nicely printed PDFs solve internal problems for gov't employees, not because they are actually any better for the users of the website. Canadian Gov't websites are full of PDF content too. :(
hidiegomariani 8y ago
Big kudos to the work you are doing. Countries I've been living before -Spain, Italy terrific experiences with gov digital services- should take lessons from you on how to run a digital and accessible PA portal online
auslander 8y ago
Because anyone can embed JavaScripts into PDF file and launch stuff. https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/analyzing-malicious-pdf/ https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/analyzing-malicious-p...
ggm 8y ago
I'm a huge fan having used HMR&C web portal from overseas, the sea-change in how good the UI is, and data collecting on what we want from the UI is also impressive. I set myself low-bar goals measuring government engagement. The Australian whole-of-government portal is abjectly awful, it has well done 2FA but continually nags me with badly designed 'do we have your permission' and 'remember you're talking to government' intersititials. State government planning web, uses a web design method which is simply unworkable on touch: the 'permit us to say we want you to agree to terms and conditions' overlay won't scroll. when the underlying page does, so the [agree] button can't be pressed because its off-screen. Gak!
rossdavidh 8y ago
I generally agree, as PDF's were designed for (and are best used for) making documents for printing on paper. BUT: "We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using PDFs. We can get data on how many times a PDF has been downloaded from GOV.UK, but we cannot measure views of the file offline." ...that section made me wonder if perhaps I have been missing a possible upside to PDF's.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cmurf 8y ago
There's a distinction between PDF and PDF/A. I agree with favoring HTML over just any PDF, for all the reasons cited in the article. But for certain kinds of documents you'd want PDF/A over HTML or perhaps in addition to HTML. PDF/A can certainly accept, and a government policy can require the use of, accessibility features and also even digital signatures.
cmurf 8y ago
Somewhere in the realm of Adobe, the PDF design/spec, and open source software, there are big problems properly supporting forms and signing. Adobe Acrobat Reader is now only supported on macOS and Windows. And only Acrobat Reader fully supports all the varieties of forms in various PDF specs. I think it's a big problem for government to in effect require the use of a monolithic and proprietary operating system to fill out government forms. And then the whole state of signing PDFs is a confusing mess. Learning how to create or buy a certificate is irritatingly confusing, and then where the certificate goes and how to use it. Google search guides and it's completely different instructions depending on platform and Acrobat version. The latest versions of Acrobat Reader let you do a thing called signing a document, but it doesn't use certificates, doesn't let you add a password to the document to prevent modification, but you can add text/image/drawing of a "signature" - no doubt this confusing thing exists because the certificate based signing is so difficult. And then verifying digital signatures isn't something people know how to do: technical companies I work with do not accept them unless the digital signature includes a visible human signature and the PDF security options enable printing the PDF!
fifnir 8y ago
I am currently doing some literature research for my phd thesis and all I have to say is : "fuck pdfs in the face"
djhworld 8y ago
One thing I find terrible about PDFs is when organisations embed useful data in them, in tables or graphs. Usually in the context of an annual report, or study, or some sort of policy document. They look great printed on paper, but not very transferrable. I know there is software [1] out there that tries to parse tables out of PDF documents, but from my experience you'll still end up doing manual adjustments afterwards to correct what the parser could not infer. That's the main reason why I support this motion. At least make the data both PDF + HTML, so you have options. [1] https://tabula.technology/ https://tabula.technology/
- nv-vn 8y ago
  For data in general, I don't think either HTML or PDF is perfect. Both are designed for you to lay out how a document is displayed, rather than the content specifically. For example, some content in HTML is invisible or split between different divs/spans/whatevers. A lot of it is generated dynamically by JavaScript and async requests. Something like JSON or XML is much more powerful for data storage. For example, you can store the data for graphs as raw data so that the consumer can render the graph however it wants. Display-agnostic data is always more flexible, and I think the best way to provide data on a webpage is both as a visual version and as raw data.
ksec 8y ago
I wouldn't like HTML for government documents. They are perfectly fine for website, or live documents. But for anything published by government there will likely be a printed version, and the online "file" will need to be in sync with the printed version as well. As a paper / documents based format, nothing beats PDF/A. I remember Obama said something along the line to tech leaders, "Your job is a lot easier when you only have selected group of customers to please, but when you have to cater for everybody and every interest group, things are a lot harder." Paper based document will continue to be used for a decade or two more. Why cant we just have both? Too much man power in auditing or publishing? Well that is what tech is for, automate it. The tech should be catering for its users, which is not just the public but civil servants as well ( I cant believe I just wrote that ), not trying to force the tech on everyone else. P.S - I thought PDF/A is an open standard. Why is everyone suggesting PDF is a closed format?
- jcrawfordor 8y ago
  PDF/A is an open standard, but it's pretty rare to see a PDF document in the wild that is actually PDF/A compliant. People generally just use the built-in PDF export in some word processor (usually no PDF/A option at all) or use Acrobat (doesn't do PDF/A by default). And non-PDF/A documents can have a laundry list of odd closed features that may or may not be supported by various readers. In general the landscape of PDF compatibility has improved a lot, but it's still a lot worse than HTML.
  - ksec 8y ago
    >And non-PDF/A documents can have a laundry list of odd closed features that may or may not be supported by various readers. Are there test suit for PDF/A compatibility?
    - oever 8y ago
      Yes. http://verapdf.org/ http://verapdf.org/ At the Dutch publication office we use this for spot-check testing for PDF/A-1a compliance.
- 8y ago
red_admiral 8y ago
When gov.uk first started to replace the previous online presence, they were like first-level tech support: brilliant if your question is in the FAQ, useless otherwise. A lot of detailed information on aspects of running a charitable organisation, which I presume weren't accessed every day, simply disappeared. For a while, the web archive of the old site was my lifeline. My feeling is that gov.uk has got a lot better since, but it's low-information-density by design. This is absolutely the right thing to do for a lot of their users in a lot of cases, and doubly so when targeting users who might not speak good English for whatever reason. But I still feel that information meant for professionals could be presented in a more useful way. On the web design side, they definitely deserve 5 out of 5. Good general design, sensible spacing, not requiring a huge javascript framework just to display some text - there's so much right with this site.
- zhte415 8y ago
  As a UK national living outside the UK, the website is fantastic. It has exactly what I need and is highly discoverable, no more than a few levels of depth to the form or submission I need. The multilingual support is also excellent.
ggchappell 8y ago
I agree with the point of the article. Still, there is so much out there that is available only in one of the MS Office formats, and Gov.UK is apparently doing better than that. So there is actually some cause for celebration here, IMHO.
yosefzeev 8y ago
Everyone always forgets about epub.
qwerty456127 8y ago
I can see no reason why it can't be HTML AND PDF. A well-composed HTML document can be turned into a well-composed PDF automatically on the server side or in a couple of clicks on the client side. It is always more convenient to use PDF rather than HTML when you want to save a document to your computer or put it on a USB drive to print it on a nearby printer.
- sjwright 8y ago
  The article makes exactly this point. The argument is against material being published with layout software (or printed from Microsoft Word) as a PDF. They argue that the canonical version of such documents should be in HTML, which can in turn be transformed to be suitable for desktop, mobile or print output.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    I don't really know about Microsoft Word but LibreOffice can produce fairly good PDFs including a table of contents if the original document is outlined properly AFAIK and it can even include the source document in the PDF so the user can open it for editing. Your commentary actually makes me curious what might be some problems of Word/LibreOffice-produced PDFs, can you name some?
saagarjha 8y ago
> We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using PDFs This might be considered a positive.
- flashman 8y ago
  Not on Surveillance Island
bo1024 8y ago
This is really interesting but it's missing discussion about what makes each format right for what kinds of information/pages. Even some examples of things currently commonly PDF that would be most helpful to switch to HTML. I have trouble believing that HTML is right for every kind of government document (for example, a quarterly or yearly report published by some agency seems like a reasonable PDF).
richyrichy 8y ago
Amazing a government organisation is not forcing you to a run a VM to open a docx OpenOffice renders incorrectly
textmode 8y ago
"[PDFs: ] They're quick and easy to create ... they can be easily created from popular applications that people are already using to author and share documents." This appears under the heading "Why do people use PDFs?" However I would have listed this as the sole reason that documents should be distributed as HTML. The reasoning is simple. Imagine a hypothetical where one has a choice of distributing documents in two formats, A and B, and there are particular advantages to each format. As such, some users prefer format A, while others prefer format B. Not to mention those users who would like to have both formats available. In the hypothetical, users can easily convert from format A to B however converting from format B to A is difficult. Assuming one can distribute the documents in format A, it makes no sense to distribute in format B. Users who prefer format A will be unhappy. Distributing in format A keeps users who like format B happy because they can easily convert from A to B.
zmix 8y ago
They should publish in XML, which kind ever, not HTML.
qalmakka 8y ago
Your government uses PDF? My dear Britons, you're have it easy. The Italian government and Italian local administrations make massive use of MS Word documents, and I'm not talking about .docx, but the old, venerable, write-once-broken-everywhere Office 97 .doc. So, I wouldn't complain that much, because it could be much, much worse, especially when you have to fill up a 20-years old form that does not render anymore on any modern word processor. Oh, well.
wwarner 8y ago
I'll make a defense of pdf publishing here. The points the author makes are good, but also show why pdf has a role to play. Responsive design being the most difficult. Imagine you're producing a scientific paper, and it contains a big table. It's unreasonable to ask an author to figure out how make every table and figure display correctly on every screen. Think of it this way. If you're publishing a pdf, then you master the formatting using your word processor (latex, word, what have you). On the other hand, if you're publishing on a responsive web site, then you really ought to have a content management system to guide you through the requirements of the platform. It's a significantly higher hurdle, both for the authors and the platform owners.
- fifnir 8y ago
  Publishing shouldn't be about displaying nicely in screen though but rather about sharing the information. As a bioinformatician, big tables inside pdfs are essentially useless. What's the point of a few hundred rows worth of a table if you can't manipulate it with whatever tool you prefer? Moreover, I'm writing my thesis and dealing with many pdfs from the 90s in most of which I can't just highlight and copy text so I need to type it out like a savage. Is it guaranteed that today's pdfs will be easy to handle for future people? In my opinion publishing should be done in plain text and .tsv files and the onus of displaying it on screen should fall on the editor (isn't that their job anyway ??)
- c4h8o3del 8y ago
  latex2html and pandoc can both convert to responsive html5, you don't need to learn anything new. For bonus points, simply distribute the latex file so that the users can convert and read it in whatever alternative format they prefer besides html. Or basically, semantic focus rather than presentation.

541 points by edent 8y ago

kqr 8y ago

One of the hardest things I remember from my time as a web consultant was explaining to my customers why PDF is not a suitable replacement for HTML. They always tried to replace half of their pages with pdf documents...

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
PDF is easy to create from a Word document, try using Word to create HTML and you get a dogs dinner. If our industry was better at creating tools for ordinary users to create HTML then the problem would solve itself.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  The issue is that people want a frozen format so they can line up images precisely where they want them to be. This is antithetical to displaying things in a browser. Sure, it can be done, but it's CSS that's fighting the browser. What we really should have done for our governments is figured out the 20 or so essential layouts and pre-coded CSS for them, but always allowed the government to fallback to custom HTML / CSS.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    Never mind that shifting one of them produces a cascade of changes that leads to some office worker spending a fruitful hour lining them all up again for version two...
    - kqr 8y ago
      This is one of the reasons I strongly prefer text-based/command-line interfaces: they're always scriptable. In the worst case you'll just generate a bunch of commands that'd take a human forever to execute.
- notahacker 8y ago
  This. Documents are generally created and laid out for print and email distribution and often have very carefully laid out data tables, charts and page number referencing (as well as less important cosmetic formatting). Simply changing the file format isn't going to solve the accessibility problems and is going to create new formatting/compatibility issues, and and changing the workflow of every member of the civil service to require them to use an accessible HTML generation tool in place of word processors for anything that might be later made public isn't a trivial undertaking either. Said accessible HTML generation tool is probably going to want to change those nice HTML files back to PDF or Word files for restricted email distribution too...
- thanatropism 8y ago
  Pandoc already exists, it's just difficult to use. You can write everything in Markdown and export to your org's Word template and have HTML, LaTeX, etc. export.
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    I really like markdown but I doubt it's the answer to this. These people aren't programmers, most of them will only have a loose grasp of what a file format is. What they need are tools that don't require a programming background.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement? Yes, but it's not a fully ACCESSIBLE document, which is half of the point of the article.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  HTML is easy. CSS is hard. CSS is hard partly because it's a mess, but mostly because designing for the web is hard. Normal human beings understand pages, in the papery sense of the word. They don't understand viewports. It takes an enormous leap of abstraction to reason about a document that could be any shape or size. Responsive design is a fundamentally unintuitive process. A lot of professional designers fail to understand this, even after years of designing for the web.
Spivak 8y ago
Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement? * If your internal workflow is designing documents then the conversion to a web document will be clunky at best. * Every end-user device has a PDF reader and their web browser probably opens it transparently. * You need the PDF either way way because the website will never be the authoritative source so now you have the problem of making sure they don't get out of sync. * You probably have a few internal graphic designers that can do wonders with print but it's unlikely you have an internal web development team. * It's much easier to make a PDF accessible than a website. (Before you disagree remember that the offices we're talking about likely don't have a dedicated web designer) You can be sure it will print correctly, and for most users it's automatically offline.
- collyw 8y ago
  Trying to read a PDF on a mobile device is usually painful.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Sure, but that's because mobile devices have really small screens. You could create PDFs that were meant to be viewed at that size, but why? You'd have the same problem trying to read a regular book through a mobile-phone-sized window. That doesn't make books an unsuitable vehicle for document delivery.
    - vidarh 8y ago
      It does make it an unsuitable vehicle for delivery of information which people may want to access from a mobile device, however.
      - thaumasiotes 8y ago
        Not at all; there is no information that people won't want to access from a mobile device. But again, a mobile device is not necessarily suitable for the job.

osrec 8y ago

Having interacted with a number of government websites, I have to say the UK government does an excellent job of theirs. Most things are simple to understand and clearly presented. Even though I only use it for the the most mundane of things, using it is generally a very pleasant experience!

mattmanser 8y ago
Yeah, it's been a real turn around, used to be awful. My only complaint is that they're sometimes too dogmatic about the one question per page thing, which is actually a pretty stupid UX commandment as soon as you get to complex logic flows. I think they've relaxed a bit on that though, I didn't notice it last time I was doing my company tax return.
- Balero 8y ago
  They do have to make the site usable by everyone including the non-tech savvy, I can definitely see good reasons for keeping the input extremely limited. One of the "downsides" of it being a government site is that it needs to be usable for everyone. Which can be a bit frustrating for power users.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    They could add a single-page view. It's not very hard to automatically generate single-page and multi-page views of the same form.
    - williamdclt 8y ago
      Not necessarily easy either, and I don't really see the point. It's perfectly usable as it is, might as well keep it simple and invest time/money in stuff more useful than satisfying the .5% of users that are techy (made up number) for the few times a year they have to use the website
      - mattmanser 8y ago

CJefferson 8y ago

This is good. One of the biggest (in my opinion) failures of accessibility in academia is that everything is published as PDFs generated from latex, which is THE least accessable format in existence (word's PDFs are fine, so it is Latex's fault they are so bad). Some people provide their latex, which improves matters, but most people don't.

detaro 8y ago
What's inaccessible about LaTeX-generated PDF?
- fyfy18 8y ago
  Good luck reading a scientific paper on your phone without lots of zooming and scrolling around.
  - detaro 8y ago
    And that's somehow better in Word-generated scientific papers?
    - CJefferson 8y ago
      Actually, word produces PDFs which contain markup for screen readers, which make them much more accessible to blind people.
  - thanatropism 8y ago
    Good luck reading a scientific paper on your phone period. Many journals are now making available the full text of papers in straight HTML (possibly only for users of participant libraries, I don't know) but that still sucks. I mean, it's a small screen.
- dubya 8y ago
  It used to be a problem that you couldn't cut and paste text from TeX-generated PDFs, and I assume this would be a problem for screen readers. I think the dvi->pdf conversion produced a PDF consisting mostly of coordinates and characters (in a non-standard encoding), which PDF readers couldn't put back together into words. This seems mostly fixed on recent pdfs, but I don't know if it's TeX (pdflatex?) or the readers that have gotten smarter. Funnily, Donald Knuth's AoCP fascicles ship as postscript files, which Preview.app converts to PDFs that can't be copied from.

pmontra 8y ago

PDF is easier for some authors: write in Word, export as PDF, mail to somebody who will upload to the web server and maybe print it for non digital distribution. Web CMS were invented (among many other reasons) to let non technical people write and edit content directly inside the browser and publish it. I wonder if gov.uk doesn't have a CMS or their authors don't want to use it.

petepete 8y ago
The gov.uk folks make heavy use of Markdown, and so they should - the sooner we leave this PDF/Word doc nonsense in the past the better. HTML in the browser is the best tool for consuming documents; we can read and write on any device, bookmark documents or chapter headings, resize and style at will in a device independent manner, enhance documents and make them interactive[1], even add videos if required. The best part is that the source is all stored in plain text and is version controlled without requiring Sharepoint or similar. [0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/markdown https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/markdow... [1] https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html-publications-new-feature/ https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html...

spystath 8y ago

I don't understand why these should be mutually exclusive. Starting from a common parseable markup you can have both responsive HTML for browsers and formatted PDF for print. Why don't decouple content from presentation?

mwcampbell 8y ago
If the HTML is responsive, why can't it be good for print? And, for the sake of reducing waste, should we not discourage people from printing in the first place?
- masklinn 8y ago
  You'd probably want a dedicated print CSS to remove various bits of UI and decoration, as well as styling which works well on a screen but is terrible in print (e.g. the white-on-black and white-on-blue headers). However gov.uk already does both so it's not an actual issue here.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  I do a lot of lit review. Having hard pagination and consisstent layout is, for me, a cognitive gain, esspeciially for longer documents, say, 20+ pages. (I frequently read 500+ page docs.) Other formats such as ePub are frequntly compact in space utiisaation, but again, the free-flowing text lacks the mnemonic framing of even a basic print book, let alone the expertise of a masterpiece of layout & typography such as Tufte. Not that HTML isn't well-suited to other cases, or that PDFs can't be awful. But there's a place.
stilley2 8y ago
This is what I do with my CV. I just keep a markdown file up to date and can quickly generate PDF and HTML versions.

_bxg1 8y ago

I listened to a talk at a web development conference from one of the UK government's accessibility developers. Among other things, they do extensive accessibility testing and discovered things you wouldn't expect. For example, to people who didn't grow up with them, dropdown boxes are apparently unintuitive, so gov.uk avoids them. I was very impressed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Mj7_0Lok0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Mj7_0Lok0

_bxg1 8y ago
I just realized, they cut out all the actual user videos in the video posted to YouTube... So that's unfortunate, but it's still a good talk.
reaperducer 8y ago
I find irony in the fact that this is a YouTube video with no text transcript, massively reducing its accessibility to both those with disabilities and those who aren't in an environment where they can sit and watch a 20-minute video. Does YouTube have the ability for authors to attach or display a text version of their video?
- coherentpony 8y ago
  It would be ironic if YouTube were owned by the UK Government. I don't think this particular situation is ironic. I think it's just simply irritating.
  - markovbot 8y ago
    YouTube provides the video uploader with extensive subtitle/CC capabilities, which they did not take advantage of.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Click the little 'CC' button in the toolbar. Video authors can upload closed captions to videos, or Youtube will autogenerate using voice-to-text which, while isn't perfect, does a decent enough job. Worth noting that this was a presentation at Texas JavaScript Conference, and the presenter likely had nothing to do with the video being uploaded to Youtube.

xchaotic 8y ago

Sadly, the great GDS team that is bringing about the great design/technical change in the UK gov is falling prey to politics from the same people that brought you #brexit. GDS used to be an initiative directly from the Cabinet Office, it has now been moved to the ministry of Culture and Sport. You might think what does sport have to do with gov website UX? But it's all politics - GDS delivered and it is making the other politicians and gov officials look bad so they are being undermined. That's my reading of that anyway - no good deed goes unpunished.

JdeBP 8y ago
Actually, once you get the name right, it being the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, it becomes somewhat clearer what it has to do with this WWW site. But this then prompts the question of exactly when "digital" became a noun. (-:
HowdyPoopy 8y ago
> ... UK gov is falling prey to politics from the same people that brought you #brexit. Oh do shut up. What has 'Brexit' got to do with this? This is the UK equivalent of turning everything into an excuse to bash Trump/Republicans. > ..That's my reading of that anyway I am sure it is. It isn't anyone else's I expect
madeofpalk 8y ago
Eh. Portfolio's get shuffled around all the time. I wouldn't look into it too much.
nextbase 8y ago
As far as I'm aware, GDS has no plans to move from Cabinet Office (source: I work at GDS).

thanatropism 8y ago

http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/ "If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in (several dialects of) Markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, Creole 1.0, Vimwiki markup, OPML, Emacs Org-Mode, Emacs Muse, txt2tags, Microsoft Word docx, LibreOffice ODT, EPUB, or Haddock markup to HTML formats XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, reveal.js, Slideous, S5, or DZSlides Word processor formats Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML, Microsoft PowerPoint. Ebooks EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2 Documentation formats DocBook version 4 or 5, TEI Simple, GNU TexInfo, Groff man, Groff ms, Haddock markup Archival formats JATS Page layout formats InDesign ICML Outline formats OPML TeX formats LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides PDF via pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, pdfroff, wkhtml2pdf, prince, or weasyprint. Lightweight markup formats Markdown (including CommonMark and GitHub-flavored Markdown), reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, Emacs Org-Mode, Emacs Muse, Textile, txt2tags, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, TWiki markup, Vimwiki markup, and ZimWiki markup. Custom formats custom writers can be written in lua."

tjoff 8y ago
You can not have PDF as an input format in pandoc. PDF is terrible because you can not easily/sensibly even parse the text. That also means it is hard to diff two versions and see the differences.
- oever 8y ago
  "Tagged" PDF files allow text extraction. Tagged PDF is often required for accessibility. Screen readers for the blind should be able to extract the text. This is possible with Tagged PDF. PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b are tagged PDF and required PDF formats in some governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Logical_structure_and_accessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Logical_structure_and_acce...

IanCal 8y ago

I'd love to have a format that is just HTML + whatever zipped up that browsers and operating systems happily just open in a browser. I like making HTML reports (rmarkdown), but sharing them requires telling people to download then open them in a browser. Google drive, for example, happily just shows you a preview but then if you click on the file you get raw html. Customers just don't understand. PDF however, is absolutely fine to move around as a single chunk, but has problems in almost every other way.

masklinn 8y ago
> I'd love to have a format that is just HTML + whatever zipped up that browsers and operating systems happily just open in a browser. There is MHTML, sadly it fails the second bit because AFAIK Chrome dropped its support and FF and Safari can't open it natively. Apple has its own WebArchive format, and Firefox's MAF extension generated MAFF file but is not compatible with newer versions.
- ksec 8y ago
  At one point in time, I thought MHTML was precisely what we need to get rid of PDF, double click, and everything works. Sadly everyone abandoned it, and Google doesn't want you to have down any webpage for archiving purpose.
- oftenwrong 8y ago
  Chrome supports MHTML as an experimental feature. Visit chrome://flags/#save-page-as-mhtml in Chrome to enable it. I wish there was an agreed-upon standard format that had cross-browser support.
reaperducer 8y ago
File > Save As... > Web Archive
- IanCal 8y ago
  I don't think you read the comment. That, in chrome, generates an html file and another folder. I would need to tell users to download the html file, download the folder, put them in the same place and open it in chrome. If I put it on google drive to share it, they'll just be shown raw html unless they then download and open it. I also tested it on a page using chrome and it didn't properly load the pictures.

Y_Y 8y ago

On a related note, I have to fill out a PDF form to make a GDPR complaint to the Data Commissioner (in Ireland). This is a plain-text form, the information could just as easily be sent in the body of an email. Using PDF means having to deal with crappy PDF software, hurting accessibility and scriptability and adding needless overhead on the other end. I wish these systems were designed by sane and benevolent programmers, rather than Pointy Haired Bureaucrats. ( https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/raise-a-concern-Form/m/1727.htm https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/raise-a-concern-Form/m/17... )

crtasm 8y ago
That's bad but small silver lining is that it's not a word document that silently renders incorrectly in other editors so you don't even see some of the fields.

Aaargh20318 8y ago

The problem with HTML is that it's not a stable format. Will a browser in 2028 be able to render those pages correctly ? What about 2038 ? If the content needs to be available for a longer time PDF/A would be a much better choice than HTML.

detaro 8y ago
What HTML + CSS from 1998 doesn't render usefully anymore?
- xeromal 8y ago
  Marquee
  - detaro 8y ago
    Is actually still supported by many browsers, and never was actually part of a HTML spec (it's only mentioned in HTML5, and marked as deprecated there). Even where it isn't, the contents likely are still visible (same with blink, which is is supported in fewer browsers as far as I know, and also never was in an HTML spec)
- Aaargh20318 8y ago
  What HTML + CSS from 1998 renders in exactly the same way (pixel perfect copy) on a modern browser as it did on a browser in 1998 ?
  - detaro 8y ago
    Notice how I specified "renders usefully". Few documents have to be pixel perfect, even fairly old HTML had tools to make individual parts where it might be more important pixel perfect, and given the higher level of standardization and standards compliance nowadays this would likely be better for documents created today.
thewarpaint 8y ago
Your browser should be completely able to render the first webpage ever created, from the early 1990s: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Steve44 8y ago

I can see for dynamic information PDF definitely has limitations but a lot of what I get from gov.uk I feel is better in PDF. The web pages are fine for navigation and overviews but for hard information I much prefer a PDF. A PDF document can be dated and versioned, you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document. You can then download a newer one if you want, the older version is still available and largely immutable. Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder.

masklinn 8y ago
> A PDF document can be dated and versioned, you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document. You can then download a newer one if you want, the older version is still available and largely immutable. Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder. How is it any let alone a lot harder? Save a timestamped copy of the file. Save it as a web archive if you fear assets depletion. Hell, pretty much every platform lets you save pages as PDFs natively, good luck doing the opposite.
- CGamesPlay 8y ago
  Many pages don’t render correctly when printed to PDF (it’s easy to accidentally make your page entirely illegible after printing), and most pages that rely on JavaScript completely fail to operate when saved as a web archive. So saving pages is, in my experience, quite a crapshoot.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    In addition to that point /static/ content on websites can be easily cached. Want to have a forum as an optional /extra/ on an otherwise static page? Maybe OK, but please have a way of getting that forum as a different page (which is updated on some basis, maybe per post, maybe with a cooldown of maximum 1 generation every X or only during low server load, etc).
throwaway37585 8y ago
> A PDF document can be dated and versioned So can an HTML page. > you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document... Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder. Right click, save page as... Am I missing something?

aquamo 8y ago

I'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs. Allow the presentation layer to be handled on the end points. Maybe something like markdown will be sufficient. I always look up to the fixed width font model used by IETF RFCs. They are extremely readable and searchable and last for a long time.

reaperducer 8y ago
I'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs. Someone mentions "blockchain" in 3... 2... 1...

velcrovan 8y ago

This tradeoff between the relative virtues of PDF and HTML is a good argument for looking at Pollen (pollenpub.com) a framework for designing your own markup language that is capable of targeting HTML and PDF (or any output you need: audio, Kindle, whatever). A proof of concept is here: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/ https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/ On every page at that micro-site, you can view the Pollen markup source, or the PDF version. The PDF and the HTML are generated at the same time, from the same source. Another example is my blog The Notepad (https://thenotepad.org/ https://thenotepad.org/). Both sites have links to their source on Github.

Numberwang 8y ago
I'm a big fan of asciidoc and quite sad that it didn't take of as a default format for documents.
- velcrovan 8y ago
  I think what's sad about formats per se is that you rely on toolmakers to implement them, and to decide how to translate them into the target format; and for all toolmakers to support them in ways that are coherent with each other. You also end up with this awkward two-step between the format and the tools. If some capability is missing, you wait for the format to define a way to do it, then the toolmakers to support it; or less ideally, the toolmakers define their own incompatible ways of doing it without waiting for consensus. This covers the problems I have with Markdown. It as wide support, but because vanilla Markdown only covers a 1995-era subset of HTML, there are all kinds of things (footnotes, figures, formatted code blocks etc) that people want it to do. Any given editor or CMS or site generator will support 95% of your preferred flavor's way of doing things and disagree with your other tools about the last 5%. The difference with Pollen is that it isn't a format or a markup specification; it's a programming environment. So you design the markup, and you tell it how to get from the source markup to your target format. The format is yours and the implementation is yours; they are one and the same. It is a bit more work, true, but it's less work in Pollen than it would be in any other environment because it does parsing for you and applies your transformations in a logical, ordered way.

Nursie 8y ago

Gov.uk pages are still using google-analytics and reporting the activities of British Citizens' interactions with their own government to a US-based multinational I see. And the only option to disable is to click through and install a browser add-on to opt-out. This doesn't seem very GDPR-friendly.

barrucadu 8y ago
No personally identifying information is sent to Google Analytics. IP addresses are anonymised, email addresses, dates, and postcodes are stripped too. See https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c3fefe6608fc9e82883b09c2307513996f666/docs/analytics.md https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c... and https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c3fefe6608fc9e82883b09c2307513996f666/javascripts/govuk/analytics/analytics.js https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c...
- Nursie 8y ago
  It's present on every page, and it's loaded from google. Anonymisation is pointless. The fact that they use Piwik on a couple of pages they consider sensitive (usually to do with payment) shows that even gov.uk know this cannot be relied upon to fully hide things. It shouldn't be there and I've raised a complaint with the ICO. Note that the page says that it can be configured to strip all that info, not that it does by default. One would have to look at each page to see how this is configured. And it could still be wrong to switch this on by default, under the GDPR.
  - MaxBarraclough 8y ago
    > Anonymisation is pointless. How's that?

JdeBP 8y ago

> On a responsive website like GOV.UK, content and page elements shift around to suit the size of the user’s device and browser. But they do not, on that very page. I resized the page up to full screen and then back again in a WWW browser and all that happened is that huge areas of whitespace opened and closed around the text, which remained word-wrapped in exactly the same places.

ghostly_s 8y ago
Yes, they do. The line width only increases up to a certain maximum because this is usability best-practice; there is an max optimal line length for readability.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  No, they did not. I performed the experiment myself and know what I saw, thank you. If this is a question of my "device" always being above some maximum line length, then clearly this is not suiting the size of the device. It is suiting some guidelines, not the user's device.
  - ghostly_s 8y ago
    Try another browser. I'm telling you it is clearly responsive on mine, and the down-votes are others telling you the same. Now if you're just trying to ret-con the definition of 'responsive design' to grind some personal axe, go do it somewhere relevant.
    - pwg 8y ago
      Actually, I just opened the site in Firefox's "responsive design mode" web-dev tool. The site is responsive up to about 1023 pixels wide, after which it no longer re-flows at all. It just becomes a 1023 pixel wide site inside of a much wider browser window. I think the OP's point was that they wanted the "responsiveness" to not have an upper limit of width. That if (example) they had a 4k monitor that was 2,160 pixels wide, and they maximized the browser window, they wanted the site layout to reflow to use all 2,160 (minus window decorations) of pixel width to lay out content. As it is now, if they had a monitor that wide, the site will only ever use 1,023 pixels of width to lay itself out, leaving large margins of unused space on the sides. [edit]: A bit more research shows this CSS declaration on a <div> with the class of "container": max-width: 964px;. Turning off that one CSS declaration allows the site to widen to fit a maximized browser window.

rekshaw 8y ago

I've worked with gov.uk. They are essentially a startup inside a huge organization, and their great work reflects that. One of the things they told me that struck me: most websites have customers, we have users. What they mean by this is that being a customer implies choice, whereas there is no alternative to .gov.uk, hence users don't have a choice. So it's gov.uk's responsibility to make their website as clear, accessible and useful as possible.

ReverseCold 8y ago
I think there are some parallels between "just leave (insert technology provider here)" and "just leave the country you call home". > most websites have customers, we have users. Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products? For many people, leaving digitally can have bad effects on their social life. It's arguably not as bad as moving out of the country, but it's still a practically impossible hurdle for a lot of people.
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  For at least some (perhaps many) businesses (especially small ones), leaving Facebook is not an option. Perhaps even more so for Google.
- masklinn 8y ago
  > Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products? Advertisers are the customers. Non-advertisers are the product. The goal is not to provide a good service to the product, it's to drive engagement of the product up so customers are happy.
  - augbog 8y ago
    Damn... this hit me hard and makes me realize why corporations can be pretty evil :/... in the back of their minds, they're always thinking of how to please their "true" customers.

gwbas1c 8y ago

I love using PDF to create backups of webpages if I think I'll want to look at it in the future. I generated PDFs as backups for references in college assignments, and it really saved me when pages moved mid-assignment.

Spooky23 8y ago

Overall, decisions like this are compromises, with pros and cons: "They’re not designed for reading on screens" That's a subjective distinction. "It’s harder to track their use" Not relevant for most .gov use cases. Also, sounds like something that isn't a user problem. "They cause difficulties for navigation and orientation" So does responsive design that makes discovery of content difficult in many scenarios, especially atypical scenarios. "They can be hard for some users to access" So does HTML where a poor accessibility process is in place. "They’re less likely to be kept up to date" Conversely, they more easy for a consumer understand when changes take place, and encourage a stronger release process. "They’re hard to reuse" That may or may not be a bad thing.

allannienhuis 8y ago
I think the point is: it's harder to do those things properly in PDF format. Also, I'm not sure how 'not designed for reading on screens' is subjective. PDFs are paper-document oriented and don't display well for reading on anything other than a large size monitor in virtually every case I've seen. When delivering content in a web browser, why on earth would someone prefer to view PDF vs a reasonably well laid out HTML version? I think PDFs are common in gov't websites because much of the internal culture is paper-document centred, and having those nicely printed PDFs solve internal problems for gov't employees, not because they are actually any better for the users of the website. Canadian Gov't websites are full of PDF content too. :(

hidiegomariani 8y ago

Big kudos to the work you are doing. Countries I've been living before -Spain, Italy terrific experiences with gov digital services- should take lessons from you on how to run a digital and accessible PA portal online

auslander 8y ago

Because anyone can embed JavaScripts into PDF file and launch stuff. https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/analyzing-malicious-pdf/ https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/analyzing-malicious-p...

ggm 8y ago

I'm a huge fan having used HMR&C web portal from overseas, the sea-change in how good the UI is, and data collecting on what we want from the UI is also impressive. I set myself low-bar goals measuring government engagement. The Australian whole-of-government portal is abjectly awful, it has well done 2FA but continually nags me with badly designed 'do we have your permission' and 'remember you're talking to government' intersititials. State government planning web, uses a web design method which is simply unworkable on touch: the 'permit us to say we want you to agree to terms and conditions' overlay won't scroll. when the underlying page does, so the [agree] button can't be pressed because its off-screen. Gak!

rossdavidh 8y ago

I generally agree, as PDF's were designed for (and are best used for) making documents for printing on paper. BUT: "We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using PDFs. We can get data on how many times a PDF has been downloaded from GOV.UK, but we cannot measure views of the file offline." ...that section made me wonder if perhaps I have been missing a possible upside to PDF's.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cmurf 8y ago

There's a distinction between PDF and PDF/A. I agree with favoring HTML over just any PDF, for all the reasons cited in the article. But for certain kinds of documents you'd want PDF/A over HTML or perhaps in addition to HTML. PDF/A can certainly accept, and a government policy can require the use of, accessibility features and also even digital signatures.

cmurf 8y ago

Somewhere in the realm of Adobe, the PDF design/spec, and open source software, there are big problems properly supporting forms and signing. Adobe Acrobat Reader is now only supported on macOS and Windows. And only Acrobat Reader fully supports all the varieties of forms in various PDF specs. I think it's a big problem for government to in effect require the use of a monolithic and proprietary operating system to fill out government forms. And then the whole state of signing PDFs is a confusing mess. Learning how to create or buy a certificate is irritatingly confusing, and then where the certificate goes and how to use it. Google search guides and it's completely different instructions depending on platform and Acrobat version. The latest versions of Acrobat Reader let you do a thing called signing a document, but it doesn't use certificates, doesn't let you add a password to the document to prevent modification, but you can add text/image/drawing of a "signature" - no doubt this confusing thing exists because the certificate based signing is so difficult. And then verifying digital signatures isn't something people know how to do: technical companies I work with do not accept them unless the digital signature includes a visible human signature and the PDF security options enable printing the PDF!

fifnir 8y ago

I am currently doing some literature research for my phd thesis and all I have to say is : "fuck pdfs in the face"

djhworld 8y ago

One thing I find terrible about PDFs is when organisations embed useful data in them, in tables or graphs. Usually in the context of an annual report, or study, or some sort of policy document. They look great printed on paper, but not very transferrable. I know there is software [1] out there that tries to parse tables out of PDF documents, but from my experience you'll still end up doing manual adjustments afterwards to correct what the parser could not infer. That's the main reason why I support this motion. At least make the data both PDF + HTML, so you have options. [1] https://tabula.technology/ https://tabula.technology/

nv-vn 8y ago
For data in general, I don't think either HTML or PDF is perfect. Both are designed for you to lay out how a document is displayed, rather than the content specifically. For example, some content in HTML is invisible or split between different divs/spans/whatevers. A lot of it is generated dynamically by JavaScript and async requests. Something like JSON or XML is much more powerful for data storage. For example, you can store the data for graphs as raw data so that the consumer can render the graph however it wants. Display-agnostic data is always more flexible, and I think the best way to provide data on a webpage is both as a visual version and as raw data.

ksec 8y ago

I wouldn't like HTML for government documents. They are perfectly fine for website, or live documents. But for anything published by government there will likely be a printed version, and the online "file" will need to be in sync with the printed version as well. As a paper / documents based format, nothing beats PDF/A. I remember Obama said something along the line to tech leaders, "Your job is a lot easier when you only have selected group of customers to please, but when you have to cater for everybody and every interest group, things are a lot harder." Paper based document will continue to be used for a decade or two more. Why cant we just have both? Too much man power in auditing or publishing? Well that is what tech is for, automate it. The tech should be catering for its users, which is not just the public but civil servants as well ( I cant believe I just wrote that ), not trying to force the tech on everyone else. P.S - I thought PDF/A is an open standard. Why is everyone suggesting PDF is a closed format?

jcrawfordor 8y ago
PDF/A is an open standard, but it's pretty rare to see a PDF document in the wild that is actually PDF/A compliant. People generally just use the built-in PDF export in some word processor (usually no PDF/A option at all) or use Acrobat (doesn't do PDF/A by default). And non-PDF/A documents can have a laundry list of odd closed features that may or may not be supported by various readers. In general the landscape of PDF compatibility has improved a lot, but it's still a lot worse than HTML.
- ksec 8y ago
  >And non-PDF/A documents can have a laundry list of odd closed features that may or may not be supported by various readers. Are there test suit for PDF/A compatibility?
  - oever 8y ago
    Yes. http://verapdf.org/ http://verapdf.org/ At the Dutch publication office we use this for spot-check testing for PDF/A-1a compliance.
8y ago

red_admiral 8y ago

When gov.uk first started to replace the previous online presence, they were like first-level tech support: brilliant if your question is in the FAQ, useless otherwise. A lot of detailed information on aspects of running a charitable organisation, which I presume weren't accessed every day, simply disappeared. For a while, the web archive of the old site was my lifeline. My feeling is that gov.uk has got a lot better since, but it's low-information-density by design. This is absolutely the right thing to do for a lot of their users in a lot of cases, and doubly so when targeting users who might not speak good English for whatever reason. But I still feel that information meant for professionals could be presented in a more useful way. On the web design side, they definitely deserve 5 out of 5. Good general design, sensible spacing, not requiring a huge javascript framework just to display some text - there's so much right with this site.

zhte415 8y ago
As a UK national living outside the UK, the website is fantastic. It has exactly what I need and is highly discoverable, no more than a few levels of depth to the form or submission I need. The multilingual support is also excellent.

ggchappell 8y ago

I agree with the point of the article. Still, there is so much out there that is available only in one of the MS Office formats, and Gov.UK is apparently doing better than that. So there is actually some cause for celebration here, IMHO.

yosefzeev 8y ago

Everyone always forgets about epub.

qwerty456127 8y ago

I can see no reason why it can't be HTML AND PDF. A well-composed HTML document can be turned into a well-composed PDF automatically on the server side or in a couple of clicks on the client side. It is always more convenient to use PDF rather than HTML when you want to save a document to your computer or put it on a USB drive to print it on a nearby printer.

sjwright 8y ago
The article makes exactly this point. The argument is against material being published with layout software (or printed from Microsoft Word) as a PDF. They argue that the canonical version of such documents should be in HTML, which can in turn be transformed to be suitable for desktop, mobile or print output.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  I don't really know about Microsoft Word but LibreOffice can produce fairly good PDFs including a table of contents if the original document is outlined properly AFAIK and it can even include the source document in the PDF so the user can open it for editing. Your commentary actually makes me curious what might be some problems of Word/LibreOffice-produced PDFs, can you name some?

saagarjha 8y ago

> We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using PDFs This might be considered a positive.

flashman 8y ago
Not on Surveillance Island

bo1024 8y ago

This is really interesting but it's missing discussion about what makes each format right for what kinds of information/pages. Even some examples of things currently commonly PDF that would be most helpful to switch to HTML. I have trouble believing that HTML is right for every kind of government document (for example, a quarterly or yearly report published by some agency seems like a reasonable PDF).

richyrichy 8y ago

Amazing a government organisation is not forcing you to a run a VM to open a docx OpenOffice renders incorrectly

textmode 8y ago

"[PDFs: ] They're quick and easy to create ... they can be easily created from popular applications that people are already using to author and share documents." This appears under the heading "Why do people use PDFs?" However I would have listed this as the sole reason that documents should be distributed as HTML. The reasoning is simple. Imagine a hypothetical where one has a choice of distributing documents in two formats, A and B, and there are particular advantages to each format. As such, some users prefer format A, while others prefer format B. Not to mention those users who would like to have both formats available. In the hypothetical, users can easily convert from format A to B however converting from format B to A is difficult. Assuming one can distribute the documents in format A, it makes no sense to distribute in format B. Users who prefer format A will be unhappy. Distributing in format A keeps users who like format B happy because they can easily convert from A to B.

zmix 8y ago

They should publish in XML, which kind ever, not HTML.

qalmakka 8y ago

Your government uses PDF? My dear Britons, you're have it easy. The Italian government and Italian local administrations make massive use of MS Word documents, and I'm not talking about .docx, but the old, venerable, write-once-broken-everywhere Office 97 .doc. So, I wouldn't complain that much, because it could be much, much worse, especially when you have to fill up a 20-years old form that does not render anymore on any modern word processor. Oh, well.

wwarner 8y ago

I'll make a defense of pdf publishing here. The points the author makes are good, but also show why pdf has a role to play. Responsive design being the most difficult. Imagine you're producing a scientific paper, and it contains a big table. It's unreasonable to ask an author to figure out how make every table and figure display correctly on every screen. Think of it this way. If you're publishing a pdf, then you master the formatting using your word processor (latex, word, what have you). On the other hand, if you're publishing on a responsive web site, then you really ought to have a content management system to guide you through the requirements of the platform. It's a significantly higher hurdle, both for the authors and the platform owners.

fifnir 8y ago
Publishing shouldn't be about displaying nicely in screen though but rather about sharing the information. As a bioinformatician, big tables inside pdfs are essentially useless. What's the point of a few hundred rows worth of a table if you can't manipulate it with whatever tool you prefer? Moreover, I'm writing my thesis and dealing with many pdfs from the 90s in most of which I can't just highlight and copy text so I need to type it out like a savage. Is it guaranteed that today's pdfs will be easy to handle for future people? In my opinion publishing should be done in plain text and .tsv files and the onus of displaying it on screen should fall on the editor (isn't that their job anyway ??)
c4h8o3del 8y ago
latex2html and pandoc can both convert to responsive html5, you don't need to learn anything new. For bonus points, simply distribute the latex file so that the users can convert and read it in whatever alternative format they prefer besides html. Or basically, semantic focus rather than presentation.