Link checker triggered on <a name="..."> and <a id="..."> about html-proofer HOT 6 OPEN

Curiously, name is listed under Deprecated attributes; this project has only ever really attempted to target HTML 5.

The single id rather than href is interesting, I never knew that. Would the suggestion of setting allow_missing_href = true work for you though?

from html-proofer.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I only quoted the name attribute as it included a description of what it was meant for, i.e. what id is being used for here. Don't know if this is a common thing to do nowadays, though. I just changed the name with id when preparing my texts, out of habit of old when <a name="..."> was the only way to define anchors (that I knew of).

The single id rather than href is interesting, I never knew that. Would the suggestion of setting allow_missing_href = true work for you though?

In the sense of not showing the warning for <a id="..."> yes, it will not show the message. However, I would also not be notified in the rare cases where I might actually have missed to fill in the href, unfortunately.

To provide context: running html-proofer on my project as-is results in about 2000 failures, by far the most are "'a' tag is missing a reference" messages - I'd guess that at most five of those are actually missing hrefs and all others are of the <a id="..."> kind. I would have to verify each and every one to find them, though.

from html-proofer.

Cheers, I've hit this issue as well, with asciidoc generated HTML pages which also use <a id="token"></a> anchors and elsewhere the <a href="#token">Some text</a> references.

Per https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_a.asp this is valid, the a tag accepts "Global Attributes" which include an id : https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_standardattributes.asp

It seems that the <a name=...> syntax is obsolete (not documented in the page above); Q&A like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16974480/if-a-name-is-obsolete-what-is-preferred confirm that. The name attribute is known for some other tags/elements: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_name.asp

from html-proofer.

To answer the additional question above, at least with htmlproofer 3.14.1 (as available in the Ubuntu 22 that I have under hand), and command-line tool usage, the option did not help:

• In full form - "needless":

:; htmlproofer --allow_missing_href=true protocols/apcsmart.html
/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary/program.rb:31:in `go': needless argument: --allow_missing_href=true (OptionParser::NeedlessArgument)
        from /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary.rb:19:in `program'
        from /usr/bin/htmlproofer:11:in `<main>'

• In short form - no effect:

:; htmlproofer --allow_missing_href --disable-external protocols/apcsmart.html
Running ["ImageCheck", "LinkCheck", "ScriptCheck"] on protocols/apcsmart.html on *.html...


Ran on 1 file!


- protocols/apcsmart.html
  *  linking to internal hash #@ that does not exist (line 729)
     <a href="#@"><strong></strong></a>
  *  linking to internal hash #B that does not exist (line 508)
     <a href="#B">actual voltage</a>
  *  linking to internal hash #B that does not exist (line 515)
     <a href="#B">current battery voltage</a>
...
  *  linking to internal hash #x that does not exist (line 708)
     <a href="#x">battery change date</a>
htmlproofer 3.14.1 | Error:  HTML-Proofer found 23 failures!
/usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/html-proofer/runner.rb:172:in `print_failed_tests': \e[31mHTML-Proofer found 23 failures!\e[0m (RuntimeError)
        from /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/html-proofer/runner.rb:50:in `run'
        from /usr/bin/htmlproofer:105:in `block (2 levels) in <main>'
        from /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary/command.rb:220:in `block in execute'
        from /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary/command.rb:220:in `each'
        from /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary/command.rb:220:in `execute'
        from /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary/program.rb:42:in `go'
        from /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/mercenary-0.3.6/lib/mercenary.rb:19:in `program'
        from /usr/bin/htmlproofer:11:in `<main>'

A variant of the page is available at https://networkupstools.org/protocols/apcsmart.html and links like https://networkupstools.org/protocols/apcsmart.html#R do work in a browser to jump to referred parts of the table etc.

from html-proofer.

Curiously, I haven't seen complaints about 'a' tag is missing a reference on the systems I've tried (also checked htmlproofer 3.19.2 on Debian 12).

But given that the current release is 5.0.9, maybe that complaint just appeared "too recently" :)

from html-proofer.

UPDATE: With a custom-built 5.0.9, it seems to mostly like the existing file (at least, WRT the internal hash links).

from html-proofer.