The GOV.UK team writes about running the UK government's website, including web performance, accessibility, and content guidelines.
HN commenters praise GOV.UK as clear, accessible, and well designed, and cite the blog's posts on removing jQuery and social sharing.
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
[1] https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html-publications-new-feature/
To be fair, they are actually very transparent about their use of Google Analytics [1][2], and anonymise some of the data [3]. That is not too bad keeping in mind they share a huge chunk of that data with the public [4][5].
[1] https://www.blog.gov.uk/cookies/#googleanalytics
[2] https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2015/05/22/upgrading-to-universal-analytics/
[3] https://assets.digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk/spotlight/javascripts/analytics-7d55304a990af8fbf6e44c4df1211d6a.js
[4] https://www.gov.uk/performance/web-traffic
[5] https://www.gov.uk/performance/about
In general the gov.uk website is stellar. Lots of good info, and plenty of thought has gone into making everything clear, accessible and pleasing to the eye. Things generally work in a way that they really don't on most public org websites. The team behind it blog a fair bit about how they've made these things happen.
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk
The only downside is that they often send you to sites run by other, significantly less competent bodies (looking at you, student loans company).
The writers are Matt Hobbs and Andy Sellick, respectively Head of Frontend Development and Senior Frontend Developers at GDS. They may have considered alternative options.
Here's a previous article explaining why they did what they did:
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/11/how-and-why-we-removed-jquery-from-gov-uk/
Incidentally, if you’re interested in the performance cost of jQuery, GOV.UK posted last year an analysis of the performance gain seen when they removed jQuery in favour of vanilla JS: https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/15/the-impact-of-removing-jquery-on-our-web-performance/
Can't think of where that particular finding is written up, but you can find a lot of our research and guidance on our blogs and site:
https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/
https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual