How to Provide Feedback For the W3C Markup Validator
Finding help on validation and Web authoring
Your page doesn't validate, and you don't know why, or
you have a question about
HTML
,
stylesheets or validation?
First, check our
Help and
FAQ
document
, as well as the
Web authoring
FAQ
to see if your question has been answered there.
The two most common problems are:
Validating pages with
ampersands (&'s) in
URLs
and
Validating pages with
JavaScript:
HTML
in a
SCRIPT
Element
.
If your problem isn't covered by one of the resources above,
you can send it to one of the following forums:
Each of these forums have plenty of experienced
HTML
authors who are willing to share their expertise. If you are
commenting on a specific page, be sure to provide a
URL
when you ask your question!
Error message feedback
If you think the error messages in the Markup Validator's result pages could be improved, or are not comprehensible,
you can send questions and suggestions to our mailing-list.
If you do not understand an error while validating a page, or if you need help on validation,
read the FAQ
and help
(see the section
Finding help on validation
) and
search the list archives
for existing mail threads on the topic
before sending any message to the mailing-list
.
Before you send any feedback on error messages, we encourage you to search the archives for existing messages on this error
in case your feedback has already been sent, or answers to
your query have already been given.
Once you have checked that your suggestion has not been given yet, you can send your message. To write an efficient message:
- Add a meaningful subject line
: summarize your feedback in a handful of words;
- If our system added [VE][XX] at the beginning of the mail subject, keep it.
Otherwise, please precise which error message you are sending feedback about;
- Give some context
. Generally speaking, this means
give the URL
of the page you were trying to validate.
The more context you give, the easier it will be for others to understand your problem, question or feedback.
- What is your feedback?
. Explain your suggestion, or question, in a clear and informative manner. Be precise and thorough.
Once you have checked all the criteria above,
send your message to the www-validator public mailing-list
.
Discuss and participate
If you are interested in helping to improve this
service, by writing code or just providing ideas, you should feel free to join or send a message to our mailing-list.
The
public
mailing-list to discuss the Markup Validator, Link checker and other tools is
www-validator
.
You can
subscribe
to the list
(and
unsubscribe
), or if
you just have a small patch or idea and don't want to join the list, feel
free to
send it directly to the list
. But whatever you do,
always use the
mail
search engine
first to check for existing messages on a given topic.
If you just want to have an informal discussion with developers and users of the Validator,
you may also join the IRC channel #validator on the
freenode
network (irc.freenode.net).
However, please keep in mind that
this is not a support channel
.
Bug reports
W3C tracks bug reports on the validator through the GitHub repositories
where the code is maintained. Developers
and other technical users can log bug reports and feature suggestions
directly. If you are not familiar with issue tracking systems in general,
send your feedback to the
mailing list
and someone on the W3C Validator Team will take care of logging your
issue as appropriate.
There are two distinct repositories where issues can be filed; if you're not sure which to use, pick the first one and we will take care of transferring it if necessary:
- the
(X)HTML validator
which is used to validate HTML4 and XHTML documents, and provides the shared front-end for markup validation;
- the
NU validator
which is the most actively maintained project, used to validate HTML5 / HTML LS documents.
Before you enter a new bug, we strongly encourage you to check that it is not yet in the list of opened issues.