It has not been my experience that government RFPs contain bullet points like "URLs should be non-redundant" and "In general, the software should not suck." No, instead they're like "The website shall make specific steps to be Y2K compliant as outlined in the Council of American Governors Strategy Memorandum On Y2K Compliance, edition 2.1A revised."
P.S. Find the Y2K compliance code. It doesn't work, but working is not the reason they needed Y2K compliance code in the first place -- it is just another checkbox to fill.
I used to work for a company that made custom web applications, occasionally for the government (though more often, not.) This problem is actually a pretty tough one.
The way it usually works is the government agency drafts a request for proposal which has a list of features and other miscellaneous, sometimes random requirements. The thing is, who at the government would think to request friendly or short URLs? They are not web developers. They are probably older than 40, and not really up on all this social media stuff.
Now, some firms that submit proposals are of a high-enough quality that they would know that friendly and/or short urls are a part of modern web best practices. But again, how does the government agency know that seeing that is a good sign?
So sometimes, the agency realizes it doesn't know anything about technology and hires a company who does to develop the RFP. Except, then you're back at the same problem: how does the government agency know how to choose a company that will write a good spec?
Yep it's tough being over 40 - we don't really understand this web stuff. I mean we invented it all 20years ago, we wrote the first browsers and the first servers, we wrote the first pages - but since we don't spend all our time following #britney or end every sentence with LOL we obviously can't understand it.
We used to have to gopher our info out of Gopherspace at six o'clock in the morning! And our modems worked if we were lucky! There were no youtubes or graphics, our search engines were named after Archie characters, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
But you try and tell the young people of today that ... they won't believe you.
RFPs are written by people you never met, were negotiated by people you barely know. Coding standards likewise. If you do something smart, the auditor or whomever will piss on your boss, who will kindly (or not so) tell you to quit making his life so difficult and knock it off. You will learn and scratch your creative itch.
I worked in that environment, but I could talk to the govt. guy in charge and his minion was a pretty good guy. So long as we followed the RFP and the law, we could tweak the implementation. I was a consultant so anytime I felt down, I picked up my bank statement and let its glow sooth me.
My guess is that "html" really means "folder full of static stuff," and each project needs to be in it's own subdirectory called "home." Confusingly, Apache or whatever might be config'ed to read directories indexes from home.shtml.
The first html is the generic static assets folder, and the second is the local projects' folder full of assets.
Is it really that big a deal? They do have a short home page URL to advertise that redirects to this page, and everyone else really just uses bookmarks.
