Small Improvements

We are approaching the two-year anniversary of FederalRegister.gov (FR2) in July, so it is time to take stock of the overall look and feel of the site. In the next few weeks we will be making small improvements and tweaks to HTML pages and other features. This weekend we put in place the first of these changes (we have a few more on the way). Some of our minor changes are listed below in no particular order:

• To improve the Article Page, we:
  • Streamlined auto-generated tables of contents by eliminating irrelevant entries such as “notes,” and we only create a TOC when an article has at least two entries.
  • Removed the table of graphics to reduce clutter.
  • Moved the “Action” line into the main body of article. We think the agency action (such as “Direct Final Rule”) should be located more centrally because those document sub-types are important.
  • Moved “Citation” above “Page” in the sidebar.
  • Added an icon and hover text to show printed page breaks in the HTML view. This helps users who need to create pinpoint citations.
  • Styled the document number / filing date / billing code at the end of FR2 articles.
  • Removed the “MyFR” and “Feedback” links from the print view, and fixed italics.
  • Fixed the wrapping of long URLs.
  • Added support for www2.example.gov links in addition to www.example.gov links.
  • Improved style support on tables (centered cells, indented cells).
  • Improved indenting of bulleted lists.
  • Revised handling of superscripts and subscripts.
  • Made footnote hovers more readable.
  • Are no longer linking to default dockets on Regulations.gov because they do not relate to a particular action. Those default dockets are agency holding tanks containing a hodge-podge of items (denominated as “[AGENCY]_FRDOC_001”).

• To improve the Agency pages, we:

– Added Rule, Proposed Rule, and Notice icons to all sections of agency pages.

• To improve the MyFR tool, we:

– Added filters by document type.
– Installed a security upgrade.

• To improve searching, we optimized the search engine for the “by date” page.

• For subscribers, we added email “Subscribe” links to the Unified Agenda Item page.

• For developers, we made improvements to our FR2 API.