checklink: improvement suggestions

L.S.,

When using W3C Link Checker to check a website (www.cheider.nl) I ran into the following (using Firefox 2.0):

1. No autoscroll
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While the link checker is running, the result listing does nog automatically scroll to keep the current end of the list visible. So one has to manually scroll down to follow the process. When checking recursively, the list may become pretty long, so it can be difficult to meticulously view the results.

Suggestion: let the result list automatically scroll while the process is running.

2. Overall result
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It is not immediately obvious what the overall result of all pages is. A "total" report at the end (maybe in a different layput?) might be convenient.

3. Javascript in links
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At first, I got an error message on a link like <a href = "javascript:MakeEml ('name', 'domain', 'subject', 'body');">. I was being warned that this link may not be accessible to visitors having their javascript disabled. This is obviously true. But as the website relies heavily on javascript, visitors with javascript disabled will not be able to view it anyway. The reason I use this javascript function is to hide e-mail links from address "harvesters", in order to avoid spam. The function name "MakeEml" stands for "Make E-mail message" (I not only avoid the string "mailto:", but also strings like "email" and "e-mail"). It generates the url name@domain, optionally appending the subject and body parameters as non-default values if these are non-empty strings.
I tried to suppress this error message with a line Disallow: javascript in robots.txt, but that did not work.
I did find a workaround in the form of <span class = "a_sim" onclick = "javascript:MakeEml ('name', 'domain', 'subject', 'body');">, which works fine and does not produce this error message. (Class "a_sim" is a CSS class simulating the mouseover effects of the <a> tag.)

Suggestion: A workaround in the form of an appropriate line in robots.txt, as mentioned above, seems to be more elegant.

Sincerely,
Hahn Informatica
Ir. H. Hahn
Braak 48
NL-5501DK Veldhoven
Nederland / Niederlande / Netherlands
Tel. +31 40 2300161
Fax +31 40 2300163
E-mail: h.hahn@hahn-informatica.nl
Internet: http://www.hahn-informatica.nl
BTW / MWSt / VAT: NL 092 081 046 B01
HR / HR / RC: Eindhoven (NL), 170 62224

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2007 14:54:09 UTC