This is the strategy adopted by lots of MySociety projects, and they’re all the better for it. Not least with the increasing use of hand-held devices for web browsing, which are significantly lower-powered than desktop PCs – and the desire to reuse computers which are “too old” for the latest version of Windows.

Simple, accessible websites which can be browsed using free software on low-powered machines are more important than all the bling in the world.

Both of those are good, solid examples of traditional fluff-free web engineering, which can be summed up as “give us the data you have, in any reasonable format, and we’ll take care of the rest”. Both well worth doing, both can be done at virtually no cost (although I’m sure the government will manage to spend a lot of money on getting them done, in its usual inefficient style), and both are inhibited only by crufty old decision-preventing bureaucracy.

(Costing: the ‘free our bills’ proposal can be accomplished merely by changing the way that an office-worth of clerks, plus the MPs and their staffs, write these documents; there would be some transition costs for rewriting forms and policies, which could even be paid for in reduced productivity rather than cash; the proposal to publish transaction records is even easier, because most of the councils are already using commercial accounting software that can dump out the data in more or less standard formats, and all they need to do is shove it on a website somewhere)