The new Office for Budget Responsibility has a new website. Itโs quite nice looking: plain, sober, entirely befitting its subject matter. Its HTML validates, albeit with some 404 errors around favicon graphics; and itโs easy to find your way around โ although admittedly, with a tiny handful of pages, bewildering navigation would have been quite some achievement.
So on the surface, itโs a nice enough job. But it frustrates me to see yet another website launched without so much as an RSS feed; and with an almost total reliance on PDFs for its main substance โ not for the first time, even the most basic text-only press release is only available in PDF format. No data.gov.uk-friendly data files, either. (Not yet anyway.)
There also seem to be suggestions in the source code of manual HTML coding going on behind the scenes..? Surely not.
Response
Itโs criminal to release press releases as PDFs โ itโs puts web publishing back to the 1990s. Absolutely no need.