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This is a prototype for possible presentations of Bills and associated material on the web. The data used for the prototype has been extracted from the output of the Bills production system. The HTML pages produced are just example demonstrations, we are not currently in a position to produced similarly formatted pages for other Bills currently going through Parliament.
There are clearly several formatting and presentational issues on some browsers: we are aware of these and would obviously not develop a production system without addressing them.
The UK Parliament has sponsored this work and it has been developed by in-house Parliamentary staff. We would prefer to gather comments on this prototype through the Parliament Labs site at http://parliamentlabs.wordpress.com/ – in order to keep our communications on this project open, accessible and public.
We welcome any feedback on this prototype – and would be particularly interested in your comments on the following:
- how can we improve the presentation of Explanatory Notes?
- is the use of RDFa useful?
- should the HTML produced be valid HTML 5?
- should fragments of Bills be made available, in addition to the whole Bill?
- how should versions of Bills be presented?
- should a Bill still be readable on a browser without CSS or Javascript available?
This work is part of an effort to improve the appearance and functionality of Parliamentary material on the web – and to explore untested functionality in a small prototype.
The information used to produce the HTML pages is the output of the Bills production system, originally Adobe Framemaker files. The resulting HTML files are hosted at Heroku, a hosting service outside the Parliamentary network.
The system used to produce the HTML pages is written in a web framework called Ruby on Rails.