uswds VS govuk-frontend

Now and then I stumble upon the USWDS (the article mentions it) and am surprised how good that thing actually is.

I would like to note that there currently is no centralized Design System for the Dutch Government, unfortunately. All agencies are creating their own Design System based on the Rijkshuisstijl.

Currently I'm working on ROOS (https://rvo.nl/roos) which is the Design System for the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. This is build with the already mentioned NL Design System. My hope being that this will bring the different agencies together and start working on a centralized Design System for the Dutch Government and follow the excellent examples of https://design-system.service.gov.uk and https://designsystem.digital.gov/

I learnt a lot of Sass patterns from using the US Web Design System.

USWDS: https://designsystem.digital.gov/

FYI I recommend following U.S. gov't standards: https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/developers/

Dark/light mode is fine and all, however be wary of accessibility. Note that the US actually even publishes it's own CSS/JS framework similar to bootstrap. I believe (but I am not positive) it is here: https://designsystem.digital.gov/

I don't claim it to be perfect, but the last time I had the opportunity to use it, it put other UI/UX frameworks to shame.

It depends on the level of contribution.

You can contribute by responding to the discussions in the backlog[0], by improving the actual distributed styles and code[1] or suggesting improvements to the documentation in the link I posted above.

Bigger changes need to be backed up with user research, evidence of user needs and accessibility reviews and checks.

[0] https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system-backlog

[1] https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend

However looking at the samples with modern browsers I was unable to see the overflow issue. So it might now be entirely possible that setting negative margin is not required anymore. And it happens to actually be harmful: negative margin can change the reading order in VoiceOver!

It's quite literally open source, with a permissive license. It's often more than just inspiration, it's the literal code.

Check it out: https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ and: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend (MIT license)

For those who may be interested, the front end is actually open sourced for third parties to use.

To that end, we're still in the process of dropping support for IE 8–10, along with reducing IE 11 to 'functional'—it doesn't always look the same, but users can still complete tasks.

They're also looking to reduce support for IE11: