publisher: Decision record: Rendering Service Sign In pages using Government Frontend
Context
As Service Sign In is a new format, we needed to decide how to render it.
Decision
We had a few options when deciding where this format should be rendered from. Firstly we considered building a new rendering app, however quickly ruled this out as the content wasn't expected to be radically different to existing content, so building a new rendering app specifically for it seemed like overkill.
Next we looked at rendering the content from Frontend, and some existing Publisher formats are rendered from it and it already handles some page interaction. However there is technical debt associated with Frontend and some Publisher formats have been migrated to Government Frontend, so it seemed counterproductive to render Service Sign In pages from Frontend only for that to be changed at some point in the future.
Finally we looked at using Government Frontend, which many formats have migrated to using. Currently Government Frontend is only concerned with read-only content such as documents, and doesn't handle interactive content. While we would be allowing Government Frontend to handle more complex content, we didn't feel that this would be making the app itself more complicated. Given that Government Frontend has a more certain future than Frontend, this seemed like the right rendering app for this new format.
Consequences
We have had to add a radio button component to Government Frontend, which introduces interaction to to the app.