Phil Gyford

I was looking for some information about the history of the House of Commons. Eventually, after resorting to the Site Map, I found a promising sounding PDF, Chronology of the House of Commons.

Let’s leave aside for the moment the difficulty of finding things on the Parliament site, and the awfulness of having so much information only available as PDFs. Let’s instead open this PDF that promises so much historic information. The text, in its entirety, is:

Following a redesign of the Parliament website, House of Commons Information Office Factsheets are now available at the following address:

http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_publications_and_archives/factsheets.cfm

So, yup, you then go to that URL and once more look for the document you’re after. This time the document does contain actual information, even if it is, again, a PDF.

But what kind of mind finds it easier to create a new PDF containing the above text, rename it many times (because this isn’t the only such redirecting PDF) and then change the links in the Site Map to these useless PDFs? Rather than simply link to the useful PDFs over in the new Factsheets section. One day they might even change the Site Map to reflect the content of the site.