This is a link not a button because:
- it’s less prominent—delete is an infrequent action
- it’s a two-step process, and only the second part changes any data (so it has
a button)
If the templates page contains text messages and emails then there’s two ways it
could be structured:
- into two sections, all text messages first, then all emails
- emails and text messages interleaved, sorted by date
I think the second one is better. Imagine a situation where you mostly do emails
but have a few text messages. You’d have to scroll past the text messages to get
to your emails. Every time.
I reckon that the most commonly accessed templates will be the most recent ones.
- by default, the menu is open
- if Javascript is enabled/loaded, the links are hidden, and visual cues (▶) to
show that it can be opened are added
- clicking it opens and closes it
Message status was almost identical to banner, visually and semantically.
This consolidates the two into one component.
This means adding an extra parameter which controls whether or not the banner
has a tick (with and without a tick are the only two variations currently).
Submit form was
- a confusing name in itself
- not descriptive, because it also has an optional ‘back’ link
This commit also puts this component in as many pages as possible, stripping
out any hard-coded buttons and links.
It replaces any usage of buttons for ‘back’, because these are links, not
buttons (ie they don’t change any data).
For pages where
- we want you to be sure that you want to do what you’re about to do
- we want to be sure it’s you trying to do the thing
This adds a page that asks the user to confirm their password.
Adds the pages and wires them together, so that it’s possible to click
through them.
The wording is not quite English, but attempts to be an rough description of
what the consequences are for each of the four actions.
Users can add placeholders to their messages, eg
> …your vehicle ((registration number))
when the message is sent, this gets replaced with the data the user uploads, eg
> …your vehicle LC12 BFL
We reckon that it will be useful to see that the placeholder has been
recognised, ie that its syntax is correct, before uploading any data.
We reckon that the best way to do this is by styling it differently to the rest
of the text that the user types.
This is not a trivial problem. There are two possible ways to do it:
1 Write a Google Docs-style text rendering engine, which completely replaces
the native HTML `<textarea>` with a custom control, and programme what should
happen when the user types something that looks like a placeholder, or
presses an arrow key, or makes a selection, or…
2 Leave the `<textarea>` in place, unmodified, and duplicate layers in front
of/behind it to visually replace a placeholder with the blue lozenge
Unsurprisingly, this commit implements 2.
There are four layers. Each layer contains live-updated copy of the text in the
textbox, and each is styled differently:
- one layer behind the textbox to make the blue background
- the textbox itself
- a layer with the white text, which overlays the black text of the textbox
- a layer with an inner shadow to knock back the brackets
This is because of some interesting limitations:
- The text in the foreground and background must occupy the same physical space,
so no deleting characters from the duplicated layers
- Words can’t be split up into multiple elements,
eg `<span>((</span>regist…`:—this results in slightly different kerning to
`((regis…`, which messes up the alignment of the layers
- The textbox can’t be completely overlapped with a block of colour, because
the cursor disappears behind it. Trying to edit text when you can’t see the
cursor is hard.
Implementation
Technically this makes use of Paul Hayes work on Javascript modules in the
GOV.UK frontend toolkit[1].
It also makes use of the `oninput` event to detect changes to the textbox’s
contents. This is much more performant than `onkeydown`, `onpaste`, etc. Without
it the delay between user input and the layers all updating is too slow and you
see misalignment of the layers.
1. https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/pull/227
Having the full history of the message is more information than is necessary.
We should only show what stage the message is at, and the time that it reached
that stage.
We can do research later on to find out if users understand or care about the
different stages.
This mocks out a data structure for a job’s messages, and renders this data:
- on the notification page, as a table, which links through to…
- …the page for an indidivual message
This commit:
- removes the row numbering so it’s easier to scan the list of phone numbers
- adds subheadings for 'first three' and 'last three'
- puts the 'see all' link at the end
We could do something with Javascript to only show the selected template. For
now this is something that works without Javascript.
This means we can put off getting the build and testing pipeline for Javascript
set up, which is a bigger and more unknown piece of work.
This commit adds some stubbed data for the pages. The structure of the data
is just a proposal, but it gives the templates something to work with for now.
