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 issues that should perhaps be addressed. Point it to a directory containing your website’s HTML / XHTML / SHTML and it will analyse what it sees.
SSC analyses
- HTML tags / 1.0 / + / 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.2 / 4.00 / 4.01 / 5.0 / 5.1 / 5.2 / 5.3 / WhatWG living standard,
- XHTML 1.0 / 1.1 / 2.0, –ish,
- SVG 1.0 / 1.1,
- MathML 1 / 2 / 3,
- 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, &
- microformats v1 / v2;
with opinions on
- standard English when dialect is required,
- perfectly legal but rather untidy HTML, &
- abhorrent code such as autoplay on video.
It is incomplete. In particular, it does NOT:
- process scripts, whether Javascript, ASP, PHP, etc.,
- process styles, except grabbing class names from CSS,
- process XML or any derivative beyond those noted above,
- process recent versions of SVG;
- process any version of WhatWG HTML except that from early July 2020;
- process XHTML 5.0;
- behave in an even vaguely secure manner: its parser is holier than the famous cow, &
- do what you want or expect.
It can produce:
- a list of issues,
- site statistics, &
- ‘repaired’ code.
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 forget to mention many broken links;
- various HTML linters that analyse individual files, but not complete sites.
Read more about SSC: