Rename this component?

[timpaul]

Are we setting a precedent here that might cause us issues later on when we have multiple components? They'll all be accessible - do they all then have to start with 'accessible-'? They'll all be responsive too but we don't say that.

We'd like these components to be used beyond government. It might be good for our reputation if they all started with something like 'govuk-'.

[dankmitchell]

govuk-autocomplete sounds sensible to me.

Thoughts on this @elliecraven @edwardhorsford

[edwardhorsford]

cc'ing @alicenoakes

The reasoning for the current name is as follows: There was some intention that this wouldn't necessarily be GOV.UK specific, hence not having govuk in the name.

The reasoning for having accessible in the name is because this is what sets this component apart from other autocompletes. It's a crowded market out there, but there's not many that focus on accessibility as a first class thing.

Edit: happy to discuss both of these though.

Also related: our location picker, which is specific to us is called govuk-country-and-territory-autocomplete

[NickColley]

I'm 👍 to @edwardhorsford 's reasoning.

The more we make this broadly applicable by having the name generic the more people will use and contribute back to this project - potentially in places we will not expect.

[edwardhorsford]

There's an opposing view - though we're happy with others using this, we're very much developing it to meet the needs of government. If a PR came in adding features we didn't need or thought would hurt our needs, would we accept it?

[gidsg]

@edwardhorsford I would argue once you open up a project you generally should encourage as many contributions and wide adoption as possible, if a change is useful to one user and they want to contribute it back there is a high chance it will be useful for others. If a PR doesn't meet with our direction for the project we don't have to merge it and could encourage people to fork at that point for example.

[joelanman]

I'm in favour of having consistent naming for all components - govuk- seems the obvious choice as that's what we use for other projects. I don't think we gain enough in other areas by making the naming of components inconsistent.

[joelanman]

I think it's also really valuable that people know where this component originated/most of the work done/maintained

[Nooshu]

I'm all for a consistent naming convention used across components. As a new starter it is difficult to nail down what is what if everything is named slightly differently.

We could easily expand on the overall use-case for the component right at the top of the README, and make this a section that is added to all relevant README's.

It is also worth considering the impact of renaming on current users who have checked out the code, they will need to git remote set-url origin to the renamed repo path. GitHub will not set up any redirects from the old location. It is better to make this change now while it's usage is still limited, else it could become impossible at a later date.

Again happy to discuss all options.

[dankmitchell]

+1 on the new starter woos @Nooshu. The landscape is already vast and complex.

[NickColley]

I think at this point we'd only rename this to govuk- if it were moved into the GOV.UK Design System as an official component, this namespace is important to keep distinct to only the Design System for compatibility reasons.

You can read Extending and modifying components in production for more context on namespacing.

So I'm going to close this out, here's hoping that happens someday!