HTML Sanity Check (HSC) provides some basic sanity checking on HTML files.
It can be helpful in case of HTML generated from, e.g., Asciidoctor, Markdown or other formats — as converters usually don’t check for missing images or broken links.
Html Sanity Check (HSC)
Usage
HSC can be currently used
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As a Gradle plugin, or
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Programmatically from Java or other JVM languages (TBD).
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Future releases
In the future, we plan to provide
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Installation
Depending on your usage you have to
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Install the Gradle Plugin, or
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Install the core library for programmatic use (TBD).
Examples
Depending on your usage find respective
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Gradle Plugin examples, and
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Core library examples (TBD).
Typical Output
The overall goal is to create neat and clear reports, showing eventual errors within HTML files - as shown in the adjoining figure. |
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Types of Sanity Checks
Broken Cross References (aka Broken Internal Links)
Find all '<a href="XYZ">' where XYZ is not defined.
src/broken.html
<a href="#missing">internal anchor</a>
...
<h2 id="missinG">Bookmark-Header</h2>In this example, the bookmark is misspelled.
Use checkerClass BrokenCrossReferencesChecker.
Missing Images Files
Images, referenced in <img src="XYZ"… tags, refer to external files.
The plugin checks the existence of these files.
Use checkerClass MissingImageFilesChecker.
Multiple Definitions of Bookmarks or ID’s
If any is defined more than once, any anchor linking to it will be confused.
Use checkerClass DuplicateIdChecker.
Missing Local Resources
All files, (e.g., downloads) referenced from HTML.
Use checkerClass MissingLocalResourcesChecker.
Missing Alt-tags in Images
Image-tags should contain an alt-attribute that the browser displays when the original image file cannot be found or cannot be rendered. Having alt-attributes is a good and defensive style.
Use checkerClass MissingAltInImageTagsChecker.
Broken HTTP Links
The current version (derived from branch 1.0.0-RC-2) contains a simple implementation that identifies errors (status >400) and warnings (status 1xx or 3xx).
StatusCodes are configurable ranges (as some people might want some content behind paywalls NOT to result in errors…)
Localhost or numerical IP addresses are currently NOT marked as suspicious.
Please comment in case you have additional requirements.
Use checkerClass BrokenHttpLinksChecker.
Other types of external links
ftp, ntp or other protocols are currently not checked, but should…
Technical Documentation
In addition to checking HTML, this project serves as an example for arc42.
Please see our software architecture documentation.
Fundamentals
This tiny piece rests on incredible groundwork:
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Jsoup HTML parser and analysis toolkit - robust and easy-to-use.
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IntelliJ IDEA - my (Gernot) best (programming) friend.
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Of course, Groovy, Gradle, JUnit and Spock framework.
Ideas and Origin
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The plugin heavily relies on code provided by Gradle.
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Inspiration on code organization, implementation and testing of the plugin came from the Asciidoctor-Gradle-Plugin by Andres Almiray.
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Code for string similarity calculation by Ralph Rice.
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Implementation, maintenance and documentation by
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Initially: Gernot Starke,
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Currently: Gerd Aschemann and several other contributors.
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Similar Projects
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Once upon a time the rackerlabs hosted
gradle-linkchecker-pluginwhich was an (open source) Gradle plugin. It validated that all links in a local HTML file tree go out to other existing local files or remote web locations, creating a simple text file report.However, as of 2024-08-14 they have deleted the repository (there seems to be a fork in https://github.com/leonard84/gradle-linkchecker-plugin). -
It was perhaps based on a similar approach (linkchecker-maven-plugin) for Maven.
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Benjamin Muschko has created a (Go-based) command-line tool to check links, called link verifier.
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html-proofer is written in Ruby and provides different usage scenarios (programmatically, CLI, and Docker).
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htmltest is also written in Go(Lang) and claims to be rapid compared to
html-proofer(stay tuned; we have plans for HSC to run with Graal quickly).
Development & Contributing
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Please report issues or suggestions.
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In case you want to check out, build, fork and/or contribute, take a look into our Development Information
Licence
Currently, code is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, documentation under Creative-Commons-Sharealike-4.0. Some day we’ll unify that 😬.
Kudos
Big thanx to 
for helping us analyze and restructure our code.
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