Update: for anyone who found the monolithic version troublesome, there’s a lightweight multiple file edition at https://www.lampfrey.net/adm/light
The DWP publishes the Advice for decision making, or ADM. The ADM is not a statement of law, but it contains official guidance used by DWP staff to interpret and implement the law. It covers the benefits brought in by the 2012 Welfare Reform Act:
- universal credit
- personal independence payments
- new style employment and support allowance
- new style jobseeker’s allowance
The ADM runs to a couple of thousand pages, divided into volumes, chapters and numbered paragraphs. This structure has been somewhat obscured by the transfer to .GOV.UK – the ADM is presented as a string of PDFs, each holding one chapter, but the distinction between volumes has been lost.
Unfortunately, although the ADM is highly self-referential, there are no links between paragraphs. It’s especially awkward to follow references across the 100 or so chapters. A typical paragraph looks like this:
As an experiment, I decided to make an HTML version with functioning links. Because I was building it primarily for myself, I didn’t have to worry too much about:
- visual appearance
- standards
- perfection
I wrote a set of scripts to:
- scrape the ADM chapters from .GOV.UK
- convert these into a single large PDF
- extract this PDF into HTML
- parse the raw HTML to insert links, add back references and expand acronyms
Resulting in output like this:
A single file
I originally just wrote out the ADM as a single HTML file. This has the following advantages:
- it’s a thing – you can save it, email it, rehost it and reference individual paragraphs as URLs
- the whole document can be searched using the browser’s find function
and the following disadvantages:
- it’s big: some browsers and devices choke
- as anyone can pass it on to anyone, I can’t track its use without additional effort. This is also an advantage.
I now have a version divided into chapters at https://www.lampfrey.net/adm/light/adm-contents.html
This should work in any current browser.
There are also several drawbacks to my general approach:
- ripping open PDFs and parsing the resulting text is a fundamentally stupid way of doing things – but I don’t have access to whatever the originating format might be…
- the parsing is imperfect and ad hoc – there are also a significant number of errors propagated from the source documents
- the formatting is pretty rubbish – a consequence of the PDF -> HTML conversion
- it doesn’t self update – it would be useful to have a built-in update check
- I haven’t paid attention to accessibility
- it doesn’t offer much contextual support – breadcrumbs, etc
Even so, for my purposes it’s far more usable than the original.
The single file version is here – please read the note on browsers and devices before opening .
A note on browsers and devices
The single file version works well on a mid-range Windows PC with
- Chrome
- IE10/11
- Safari for Windows
- Opera
It chokes (semi-randomly) using Firefox under Windows, but Firefox in Ubuntu is OK. Performance is tolerable using Chrome (but not Safari) on a recent iPhone. It fails to load on at least some Browser/Android combinations. Adblockers and other browser extensions which process links can increase the load time considerably.