This commit modifies the HTML `<title>` tags for all the pages. It makes two
main changes:
- make the title tag match the `<h1>` of the page, for better or worse
- put the service name after the page title, seperated by an en dash, as per
GOV.UK
This commit examines all the pages that use the page footer component, and
determines whether they should have a back button, a secondary link, both or
neither.
Because burn your select tags[1]
This commit hard codes the markup for the time being until I can work out how
to get WTForms outputting the markup I want.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUkMCQR4TpY
WTForms sets the `id` of a `textarea` element to the variable name to which the
form control is assigned.
This conflicts with the page container, which is styled by targeting `#content`.
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.
This macro:
- accepts a WTForm form field as a parameter
- renders a form field which follows the GOV.UK Elements patterns, both visually
and in markup terms
It then changes any page which uses either:
- the old, non-WTForms macro or
- the old, WTFforms `render_field` macro
…to use this new macro and removes both of the old ones.
It also adds the option to display hint text above the textbox.
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).
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
