The Design System has standardised on back links being at the top of the
page, decorated with a small text-coloured arrow.
I think this makes more sense than having them at the bottom, because it
suggests, in some way, being able to go back before commiting to any of
the forms on the page. Whereas the things at the bottom of the page
should be performing actions on what’s in the page.
The reason for making this change now is that it de-clutters the area
around the green buttons. This was presenting a design challenge where
multiple levels of interaction were happening in the same form. Moving
these back links to the top of the page should mean that, in these
complicated forms, there’s one fewer thing to compete for the user’s
attention.
I’ve componentised this into a `page_header` macro so that the change is
easier to roll out and maintain.
Making people use a property is a sure way to make sure they’re spelling
the name of the property correctly, and allows us to easily swap out
properties that call through to the underlying JSON, and properties
which are implemented as methods.
This will stop us repeatedly forgetting to add `novalidate` and
`autocomplete='off'` to our forms (which is how most of them are set
up).
It uses sensible defaults, based on how we most-commonly configure
forms:
- most of our forms are `post`ed (but this can be overridden)
- `autocomplete` should only be enabled where it makes sense, otherwise
it’s more annoying than useful (but this can be overriden)
- we should never be using HTML5 form validation because our own error
styles and messages are better
In pages specific to a service (e.g. dashboard and sub pages) the title
needs to distinguish which service it applies to. This is mainly to give
context to screen reader users who could be managing multiple services.
Implementing this uses template inheritance:
`page_title` includes `per_page_title` includes `service_page_title`
‘GOV.UK Notify’ is inserted into every page title.
Pages that set `service_page_title` get the service name inserted too.
The mesaure on these pages was too short, making them awkward to read.
Also varies the size of text boxes to make them appropriate to the
expected size of content that they will contain.
