Consider adding 'white-labeled' header and footer components

[querkmachine]

Ahoy!

Recently, in the Design System team, we changed the name of our header and footer components to state explicitly that they are for GOV.UK. This was to voice our intention that we will be developing those components specifically for the GOV.UK proposition's needs going forwards, and want to avoid adding complexity by allowing them to be customised for non-GOV.UK uses.

Since then (and for some time before) our guidance has been that services not part of the GOV.UK proposition should create their own header and footer components, which some organisations, with their own forked design systems, have already done.

This isn't necessarily easy or time efficient for everyone to do, however, and with the upcoming GOV.UK rebrand, the Design System's header and footer are only becoming more GOV.UK-ish.

I think it'd be neat if this project could include 'white-label' versions of those components, with similar functionality, but devoid of GOV.UK-specific branding and with additional configuration options—to change things like the OGL statement and royal arms—if they even have those in the first place.

I'm happy to contribute them myself, but I wanted to get an idea of how much interest there is or whether you consider it within the scope of the Prototype Components project first.

Let me know if you're interested!

[paulrobertlloyd]

👋

Oooh, interesting. There do in fact already exist white-label (or white label-able) header and footer components in the X-GOVUK ecosystem, but they current reside within the GOV.UK Eleventy Plugin project.

These are, for the most part, exact copies of the corresponding components in the GOV.UK Design System, but with extra options to override all the hard-coded bits:

• Header. Additional options provided are:

  • logotype.text or logotype.html which replace the GOV.UK logo type
  • There is also has a ‘secret’ option that can insert the X-GOVUK logo, but that’s me creating a shortcut given we use it on so many different sites!

• Footer. Additional options provided are:

  • logo: set to false to remove the recently added GOV.UK crown logo
  • contentLicence: set to false to remove completely, else contentLicense.text or contextLicence.html to replace (using any of these options will remove the OGL logo).
  • copyright: set to false to remove completely, else copyright.text or copyright.html to replace (using any of these options will remove the Royal Coat of Arms).

As you can see, these options are pretty minor, yet give the flexibility you seek.

While these components can be ported over to this project (and happy to continue the discussion), I’m puzzled why a set of options like this wouldn’t be (and aren’t already) provided by the components in the design system. This is especially true for the footer, which contains some pretty strong assumptions about copyright and licensing which don’t always apply (I’ve removed the OGL licence more times than I can remember).

[frankieroberto]

I’d agree that being able to remove the OGL licence on GOV.UK branded services would be helpful.

Lots of GOV.UK services primarily host third-party content (eg those listing jobs, or registered designs), and whilst they do have the option of clearly stating "The OGL licence does not apply to any of the content on this page", it's very easy to forget to do so!

For those services it would probably be simpler and easier to not mention the licence in the first place, given they have so little government-owned content on them?

[edwardhorsford]

I wouldn't even consider being able to remove the OGL licence from GOV.UK stuff to be white labelling. Likely many of these services wouldn't be licensed by that, or at least not with the wording as written. It seems fair allow that a service should be able to clearly state their licensing terms.

[querkmachine]

I don't really have a response to why the Design System components continue to enforce the OGL licence and Crown copyright, other than aforementioned desire to keep things fairly simple.

I can re-raise the idea of making them optional—the methods in @paulrobertlloyd sound like a pretty good way to handle them, though wouldn't necessarily work for translated versions of the OGL statement—but we have a lot going on at the moment, as you might imagine!

I still think there might be value in having white-label versions of these components included that have the gov-specific and GOV.UK brand elements entirely removed as options.