What government is crap at: websites that work
If anyone can get the VAT form linked to on this Treasury page to download on a Mac, I’d appreciate it emailed. It’s only 29KB. But can I get it on Safari or Camino or Firefox? Nope.
If it requires a Windows machine to work, I’ll just grind my teeth. “The document you have requested is available for download only”, the page declares. Yeah, well, actually making it downloadable would be a start then, don’t you think?
I mean, this is just ridiculous. A government department that can’t commission a site so that web users can acquire the documents it insists they need. (It’s for my wife, since you wonder.) I’m just speechless. It matches the amazing incompetence of Siebel’s work for the Department of Work and Pensions, which I encountered before.
Except this is just linking a file. It lives in a directory. It’s a PDF. How can the Treasury break that? How??
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November 23rd, 2006 at 11:22 am
If the file in question is VAT 1, at http://customs.hmrc.gov.uk/channelsPortalWebApp/downloadFile?contentID=HMCE_CL_000042, on WinXP, using either IE7 or Firefox, Adobe Reader rejects is as “not a supported file type or damaged).
James
November 23rd, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Hi
Their link is broken - it does not lead to a file - Welcome to the world of dealing with the Govt.
Sorry I am unable to assist
November 23rd, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Yay! If you command click it in Safari it downloads as a file called download with no apparent file type. If you then add the suffix .pdf to the filename then Preview will open it! I have no idea what they have done to make it this hard but I have the form and will mail it to you if you can’t make this work.
November 23rd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
The page you give a link for only has the message at the top as a warning I think - the actual download link is lower on the page. And it downloads fine for me using FF2 on XP. I haven’t mailed it to you as I assume that you’ve been inundated by copies now….
November 23rd, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Ah - I’ve succeeded using gan’s method. If I got something that called itself a PDF, it was really calling itself a PDF attachment. I had to get something that just called itself “download” for it to work.
Yes! The government is asymptotically approaching the level of expertise of those who wish to use it!
November 24th, 2006 at 12:56 am
If you’re interested, it’s because there’s a colon in the file name.
November 24th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
Don’t worry, it doesn’t work on Windows either. I tried downloading it on a Mac, Linux and Windows machine and they all fail to cope with it. This might mean you are not required to file a VAT return.
April 17th, 2007 at 9:34 am
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April 21st, 2007 at 10:04 am
Another thing they are impressively bad at is leaving links either in place, or replaced by a link to what as a result of public policy has replaced it. THe NHS suffers from it a great deal - each 3 year spasm of management eliminates previous work and then recreates it.