350527 - mozilla.org should regularly use W3C Log Validator

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Gérard Talbot]

W3C Log Validator is a customizable tool which can find the most popular invalid webpages (or the most popular webpages which fail to pass CSS validation or with broken links) to help prioritize the work to get them fixed. This tool is for maintaining websites, especially large ones. 

Bug 151557 is simply just impossible to achieve and is unrealistic as well since there are many thousands of webpages which are outdated by a lot.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/LogValidator/Manual
has more links on this issue.

Expected results:
To be able to have a weekly report of, say, the top 50 most frequently visited www.mozilla.org webpages which fail to pass markup validation.

Comment 1

[Gérard Talbot]

Also worth quoting:
"
Ideally, we would have the manpower or technology to be able to go through
and make them all valid, but in practice we have too many other
things competing for our time to make that feasible. (...)
a script to check the most-visited pages on
our site for HTML validity, using the online HTML validator [2];
this script is run once a week, and sends mail to the whole
W3C team notifying us of the top invalid documents on our site.
"
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2001Sep/0031.html

Comment 2

[Gérard Talbot]

Argh... dunno what happened.. Reed, I have inadvertently changed your modifications. Sorry about that.

Comment 3

[Gérard Talbot]

CC: fantasai

Comment 4

[Deepa]

Top 50 pages on www.mozilla.org site is completely doable...is this is better as a monthly report or a weekly one?

Comment 5

[David Boswell]

Deepa, for a Top 50 pages report could we run those links through a validator to see if there are any HTML or CSS errors on those pages?

Comment 6

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Is this worth doing now instead of waiting until we finish the redesign?

Comment 7

[David Boswell]

Any stats and reporting work can go on in parallel with the redesign.  If we set up a way to combine Urchin stats with a validator, that's going to work regardless of the design of the site.

Comment 8

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Closing old Mozilla.org website bugs due to them not being relevant to the new Python-based Bedrock system. Re-open if this is a critical bug and should be resolved on the new system too.

Comment 9

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Reopening... Until Chris More or someone else says that this is being done as part of "the new Python-based Bedrock system", this bug is still valid.

Comment 10

[Chris More [:cmore]]

The Latest version of the W3C Log Validator is 1.3.1, released May 28th, 2007 thus it won't validate latest markup.

Raymond: Does Jenkins have an HTML validator? It looks like the Jenkins Unicorn Validator may work.

Comment 11

[raymond [:retornam] (inactive)]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #10)
> The Latest version of the W3C Log Validator is 1.3.1, released May 28th,
> 2007 thus it won't validate latest markup.
> 
> Raymond: Does Jenkins have an HTML validator? It looks like the Jenkins
> Unicorn Validator may work.

Chris, I haven't used it before but we can try it.

Comment 12

[Kohei Yoshino]

I think we can close this 10-year old bug as WONTFIX. W3C's validator is not so useful IMO because it shows unnecessary errors against WAI-ARIA attributes and the Open Graph protocol [1]. The View Source tool in Firefox [2] now allows us to quickly check the page's HTML errors, while the Console [3] outputs CSS and other errors. I haven't used the W3C validator for a long time. It's 2016, the Web is way more complicated.

[1] http://ogp.me/ - uses the non-standard "property" attribute
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/View_source
[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/Web_Console