back to article CSS and Javascript on GOV.UK page take early Christmas holiday

A government legal aid eligibility checker has been without Javascript and CSS for a fortnight, sources told The Register – causing a visible dip in the number of people using the service. Shortly after El Reg asked the Ministry of Justice about the flaw with the site in question, the JS and CSS magically reappeared. A man …

  1. wolfetone Silver badge

    I wonder if their web developer will be availing of legal aid shortly?

  2. Dr Who

    The site lost its CSS and JS ...

    to reveal an old fashioned honest-to-goodness HTML web page. So the legal aid registration is borked but it gives you a powerful sense of nostaligia. It happened to me the other day on the BBC website and the emotional effect was quite surprising, a bit like a smell or a tune that reminds you of a moment long ago. Ahh - them were the days - simpler times!

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: The site lost its CSS and JS ...

      they should take a lesson from this and write "simpler pages" that use STANDARD HTML rather than all of that CRAP that typically ends up in web pages these days...

      CSS is a necessary evil, but can be included in the <HEAD> section instead of requiring a 3rd party CDN [and then ONLY what is NECESSARY to display the page correctly, not "boatload of bloat" which generally ends up in a 'boilerplate' CSS]. Same with script.

      It's those "3rd party bloatware load-it-all" script/style sites that REALLY screw intarwebs performance. And sometimes, if you want to make fixes/changes to the script files, it STOPS the change from working with Chrome on an Android... [even REFRESH didn't help]. Yeah, I was pissed off about that, and embedded "only what was needed" in the HEAD section. THAT fixed it!

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NPM registry timeout

    That's what happens when you deploy the site automatically and npm install fails.

    1. macjules

      Re: NPM registry timeout

      I rather suspect that someone forgot to include 'gulp' in the Jenkins process.

  4. Florida1920
    Joke

    "we have nothing further to add"

    Kim Jong Un, is that you?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "we have nothing further to add"

      Except maybe a working web site?

      1. Christoph

        Re: "we have nothing further to add"

        They need Javascript to do the addition.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Javascript?

    Err, what Javascript?

    The site doesn't load any javascript unless you let it, and that's a very good thing as far as I am concerned. Even better the site seems to work just as well without it.

  7. Lee Mulcahy

    "we have nothing further to add"

    In other words, "Go away kid, ya bother me".

  8. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Go

    Oh yeah.

    A government legal aid eligibility checker has been without Javascript and CSS for a fortnight

    And this is bad because... ???

    Ceterum censeo, all JavaScript developers should be abducted by aliens and probed for sanity.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Alien

      Re: Oh yeah.

      we're already aliens...

  9. TrumpSlurp the Troll

    Fail early, fail often?

    See title.

  10. Peter X

    Companies House issues too?

    I had problems with the Companies House website earlier this week; specifically, the main site would work, but trying to login to actually do stuff, it seemed to get stuck not being able to resolve "ewf.companieshouse.gov.uk"... but it was *very* intermittent. In the end I had to stuff the IP I did manage to obtain into my hosts file.

    The odd thing is, all companieshouse.gov.uk domains (that I've looked at) seem to have a 60 second TTL... which... you know, could've been a thing whilst they were trying to fix/migrate/mitigate some other thing. Maybe? But that was a few days ago (Monday 18th) and today, Thursday 21st, it's still like that.

    But maybe they have a good reason, who knows!

  11. theninehertz
    Thumb Up

    NPM Registry time out

    your registry time out & NPM system fails on load time of JavaScript.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon