Now, here’s something you seldom see these days: good news from the UK Government.

Having grown accustomed to Government-backed IT projects like the national air-traffic control system or the positively mind-warpingly expensive NHS IT system, it’s good to see that maybe — just maybe — there is some hope for sanity in large-scale public IT projects, and not everyone has been dazzled by the marketing departments and flashy buzzwords of the big corporations.

For posterity, here’s the actual document (interestingly, it seems to be served from a Microsoft web server… Ahem.)

There’s a really interesting discussion going on at Eric Meyer’s blog regarding (the lack of) a decent layout system for the web. There’s also the usual troll-/flame-/bitch-fest brewing in the comments, but there are a few pearls in there that I think are worth extracting for some extra thought:

• Nick Morgan suggests a grid concept to be used for layout by implementing relationships between element’s grid parameters
• kylegl sums up the problem as the inability to define relationships between elements
• AlastairC mentions that there is already behavioural layout implementations in JS
• CSS Annoyed again brings up element relationships as the problem

I also learnt about the strange world of the W3C’s CSS Advanced Layout Module. I agree with Eric; it’s ASCII Art! I need to think a bit more about these things… I’m sure there is a solution, or at least something wise to be said.