Run html-validate on docs/ to find problems to fix?

[maelle]

Examples of things I see

• Prefer to use the native element (for the navbar dropdown, there are elements with role="button")
• Trailing whitespaces
• Use of conditional comments are deprecated (in the head, something about IE)

Maybe some of those are worth fixing.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-validate

[hadley]

IMO this is only worth doing if we can automate, preferably with an R package.

[maelle]

From quarto-dev/quarto-cli#7489 (reply in thread) I found https://github.com/validator/validator/releases/tag/latest which could be used in a GHA workflow. Not an R package 😅

[hadley]

Maybe we could just make it part of the release process? i.e. run vnu on pkgdown's own site?

[maelle]

yes! I'd need to run it on the current website, to see what it returns. 😅

[hadley]

A lot of repeated warnings like this:

"file:/Users/hadleywickham/Documents/devtools/pkgdown/docs/dev/reference/build_site.html":2.140-2.161: error: A document must not include both a “meta” element with an “http-equiv” attribute whose value is “content-type”, and a “meta” element with a “charset” attribute.
"file:/Users/hadleywickham/Documents/devtools/pkgdown/docs/dev/reference/build_site.html":270.1-270.17: error: Duplicate ID “cb1-3”.

I can't figure out where either of those is generated 😭

[hadley]

Looks like libxml2 automatically adds the http-equiv meta tag 😬 — oh but looks like I can strip it off after the fact. Oh but then libxml2 just adds it again

[maelle]

Reading the docs for read_html() reminded me of r-lib/xml2#432 (I nearly opened a duplicate issue 😅)

[maelle]

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/211

[maelle]

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/507

[hadley]

Having tried html-validate, it produces vastly superior output to vnu. I've fixed the most obvious low-hanging fruit and I think that's probably sufficient. I don't think running it regularly is going to be terribly useful as there a few false positives or things that just aren't going to be worth fixing given the potential gain.