SSC

SSC, the static site checker, is an opinionated HTML nit–picker. It’s a command line tool intended for people, like me, who hand code websites, to identify coding issues that should perhaps be addressed. Point it to a directory containing your website’s HTML / XHTML / SHTML, and it will analyse what’s there.

SSC examines

WhatWG’s HTML Living Standard, 2005 onwards
W3’s HTML 5.0 / 5.1 / 5.2 / 5.3 draft
W3’s HTML 4.00 / 4.01
W3’s HTML 3.0 / 3.2
IETF’s HTML 2.0
HTML tags / 1.0 / +
W3’s XHTML 1.0 / 1.1 / 2.0 / 5.0,
W3’s SVG 1.0 / 1.1,
W3’s MathML 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 (draft),
site internal broken links,
external broken links (requires curl),
simple server side includes,
schema.org microdata 2.x / 3.x / 4.0 / 5.0 / 6.0 / 7.x / 8.0 / 9.0 / 10.0 / 11.0 / 12.0 (not RDF yet), &
microformats’ v1 / v2.

It is incomplete. In particular, it does NOT:

understand scripts, whether Javascript, ASP, PHP, etc.;
process styles, except grabbing class names from CSS;
comprehend XML or any derivative beyond those noted above;
suss SVG 1.2 or 2 (yet);
behave in an even vaguely secure manner (its parsers are holier than the infamous cow)

It can produce:

a detailed list of matters to consider,
site statistics,
‘repaired’ code, &
a deduplicated version of the site.

It compares to the following products:

HTML Tidy can convert between HTML and XHTML, but checks few attributes and spots no broken links;
Linkchecker takes orders of magnitude longer to scan a large site, and can omit many broken links;
various HTML linters that analyse individual files, but not complete sites.

Read more about SSC:

Here’s a short example of ssc’s output, with added comments:

*** 404.html

9: <a href="/news">
 ==> "/news" not found
<!-- there is no file or directory called /news -->

50: <link href="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" rel="schema.dc">
 ..> <LINK> REL="schema.dc" is not standard HTML5/20210101/SVG-2.0/MathML-3/WhatWG
<!-- schema.dc is not a standard rel value (it’s part of Dublin Core) -->

75: <span class="biggerscreen">
 ==> <span> has no matching </span>
 --> "biggerscreen" is unknown
<!-- although </SPAN> is not always required, forgotten closures make HTML inefficient -->
<!-- the CSS style biggerscreen has not been defined -->

86: </nav>
 --> inserted missing </span>
<!-- and this is where the forgotten </SPAN> matters -->

If you would like to see more output, grab the project, compile it, and then run either recipe/tea/fulltest.sh (various unii) or recipe/tea/fulltest.bat (windows). It’ll output many examples to recipe/out.

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