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No One Should Have To Use Proprietary Software To Communicate With Their Government (fsf.org)
Donald Robertson, writing for Free Software Foundation: Proprietary JavaScript is a threat to all users on the Web. When minified, the code can hide all sorts of nasty items, like spyware and other security risks. [...] On March 1st, 2016, the Copyright Office announced a call for comments on an update to their technology infrastructure. We submitted a comment urging them to institute a policy that requires all software they develop and distribute to be free software. Further, we also urged them to not require people to run proprietary software in order to communicate or submit comments to them. Unfortunately, once again, the Copyright Office requires the use of proprietary JavaScript in order to submit the comment and they are only accepting comments online unless a person lacks computer or Internet access. [...] The most absurd part of all this is that other government agencies, while still using Regulations.gov, are perfectly capable of offering alternatives to submission.
To be fair, from what I've seen, almost every government website I've used would have been far more usable if it had not a single bit of javascript on it. Instead, all I see are nigh-unusable monstrosities.
One should not be required to use electronic anything, ever. Pen and paper, yes, handwritten notes, ought to suffice. For everyone, on their choice, not the government's. (Should I mention that noted late computer scientist E.W. Dijkstra reverted to fountain pen when everyone else went to typewriter? His choice.)
I'm not saying you shouldn't use electronic anything, I'm saying you shouldn't be required to use electronic anything. Beyond that, yes, when governmental agencies offer electronic whatnots, they'd better make sure all the required protocols are 1) open and published, or they publish them themselves, 2) of decent quality, and 3) not bound to any specific software, architecture, whatever. (Note that "html" is published but a rotten standard, so actually a bad example. So is redmond's ooxml abortion.)
The trouble is most "digitalisation" is tech- and hype focused, and tends to forget about function, even the customer. For businesses in a competetive market that's one thing. For governments, with their monopolistic outlook and their tendency to force everyone else to do their bidding exactly their way for no reason, it's another.
They're called source maps. They let you see the source in the developer tools without suffering the performance penalty of downloading unminified in production. Making source maps available fixes that complaint. I think the bigger issue is that the Copyright Office doesn't actually write their own code, and the vendors often don't provide unminified versions that can be source mapped.