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Validator.nu Useful Warning Requests

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Revision as of 14:11, 3 September 2009 by Lachlan Hunt (talk | contribs) (Fixed a row heading, adjusted named entities description)
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This page documents requests for potential optional checks to be implemented by HTML5 QA tools, like Validator.nu. This is only intended to document feature requests, and may not reflect what is, or will be, implemented in the future.

The following tables describe issues that a QA tool might provide options to warn about. None of the issues listed in these tables are technically conformance errors, but have been requested directly by authors and/or are considered to be useful for authors to be warned about.

Syntactic Issues

Title Description Notes
Quoted attributes Boolean option to require quoted attribute values for all attributes. XHTML-like syntactic convention commonly requested by authors. (request)
Minimised attributes Boolean option to require all boolean attributes to use the non minimised form. e.g. <input disabled="disabled"> instead of <input disabled> XHTML-like syntactic convention commonly requested by authors.
Trailing Slashes Options to either:
  1. Warn about unnecessary trailing slashes in void elements
  2. Require trailing slashes for in void elements
  3. None (default)
Some authors like to follow the XML convention, others prefer to always omit them, and others don't care that much. (request)
Optional End Tags Boolean option to require end tags for all non-void elements, which normally have optional end tags (request)
Optional Start Tags Options to require start tags for the elements 'html', 'head', 'body' and 'tbody'. XHTML-like convention, mostly applies to html, head and body. Some authors still choose to omit tbody, but like to always include the others.
Named Entities Options to allow:
  1. The 5 predefined named entity references only (lt, gt, amp, quot, apos)
  2. HTML 4.01 entity references only
  3. All named entity references
Warning about HTML4.01 references is a useful check for compatibility reasons, due to existing legacy browsers that don't support the additional entity references imported from MathML yet. Use of only the 5 predefined entity references is needed for those who want XHTML compatibility, without a DOCTYPE.

Other Warnings

Title Description Notes
Untitled document Warn about the use of meaningless or empty titles. e.g. <title>Untitled document<title> (or similar) This is a common default title inserted by authoring tools. Advise the author to use a more appropriate title for the document. (request)
Unnecessary whitespace Warn about long stretches of unnecessary whitespace (request)