[Bug 2346] Allow link validator to check links to Link, and Markup, Validators

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=2346


Etienne Miret <elimerl@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |elimerl@gmail.com




--- Comment #5 from Etienne Miret <elimerl@gmail.com>  2008-09-01 09:02:24 ---
> How could a robots.txt entry influence the link checker's handling of recursive
> requests, at all? Under normal circumstances, a link checker will find many
> identical links in its input; so it certainly will keep a list of links already
> checked, and any sort of recursive link structure will not be able to get the
> link checker into an infinite recursion, or loop.
A *same* instance of the link checker will remember previously visited links.
But in case the link checker send a HEAD request to itself, it will start a new
instance of itself, with no links cached.

The following page, if located at http://example.com/recursive, will trigger an
infinite loop:
---
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head><title>Infinite Link Chekcer Loop</title></head>
<body><p>
<a
href="http://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http://example.com/recursive&amp;hide_type=all&amp;depth=&amp;check=Check"
>Check this page's links</a>
---

The case of links to the MarkUp Validator is different. As long as the MarkUp
Validator isn’t able to start instances of itself or of the Link Checker, there
are no risks of recursion, and thus no risks of infinite loops. However, if
each page of a website contains a validation link
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer>, a recursive link checking of the
site will trigger markup validation of *all* its pages, which doesn’t seems
desirable. While performing markup validation of a full website is surely
desirable, the Link Checker is not the appropriate tool to use, the Log
Validator is.

Thus, I suggest this bug being marked as WONTFIX.


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Received on Monday, 1 September 2008 09:02:59 UTC