With a few exceptions, this is a record of mainly just user-facing changes — that is, either changes to the actual behavior of the checker, or changes to any options/interfaces the checker exposes for developers.
NN XXX NNNN
- Allow
loading
attribute for theiframe
element (lazy loading) - Allow
autocomplete=username
withinput[type=email]
- Allow
operator=lighter
for SVGfeComposite
element - Allow more values for SVG
feBlend
elementmode
attribute - CLI: Add nu.validator.htmlparser.tools|test classes to vnu.jar
- CLI/Docker: Enable setting timeouts & bind address w/ environment vars
- CSS: Support color-adjust
- Docker: Migrate Dockerfile to “distroless” image (reduces image size)
- ARIA: Allow
aria-required
withinput[type=file]
- Update doc-fetching backend to Apache HTTP Components HttpClient 4.5.9
- Make the checker use HTTP 1.0 for all requests it make, not HTTP 1.1
- Make the checker ignore error for malformed/missing HTTP closing chunk
30 June 2020
- CLI: Add new
--stdout
option, to report all messages to stdout - CLI: Ensure the
--version
option reports the actual version - CLI: Actually check SVG files, rather than just seeming to (bug fix)
- CSS: Improvements in
calc()
,min()
/max()
checking, more - Allow
height
andwidth
attributes for SVGsymbol
element - Allow
capture
attribute for theinput[type=file]
element - Allow
disabled
attribute for thelink[rel=stylesheet]
element - Treat custom elements as labelable elements for
label[for]
handling - ARIA: Fix bug that disallowed implicit combobox/listbox for
select
- ARIA: Improve error message for
alt
-lessimg
with ARIA attributes - ARIA: Allow
section[role=doc-glossary]
16 March 2020
- Disallow
accept-charset
values other thanUTF-8
- Disallow object[typemustmatch]
- Allow SVG feDropShadow element (from Filter Effects spec)
- Allow
loading
attribute for theimg
element (lazy loading) - Allow
rel=modulepreload
for thelink
element - Allow
integrity
attribute on link[rel=preload|modulepreload] - Allow
integrity
attribute on script[type=module] - Allow
autofocus
as a global attribute - Allow
inputmode
as a global attribute - Allow
nonce
as a global attribute - Allow
allow-downloads
in iframe[sandbox] - Allow heading content within
legend
element - Allow negated media features in
media
andsizes
attributes - Align
autocomplete
checking with current spec - CSS: Improve support for color values
- ARIA: Allow implicit roles to satisfy owned-by requirements
- ARIA: Add proper ARIA checking for the
math
element - ARIA: Align all role checking with current HTML-ARIA spec
- Add option to specify additional script for Web-based checker
- CLI: Make --errors-only option take precedence over --Werror
- CLI: Enable checking standard input as SVG or CSS
- Include binary runtime images in release (alternative to jar/war)
- Dockerfile: Switch to using binary runtime image rather than jar
- Add checker.py script to repo (for building/testing/running checker)
- Add option to bind to specific IP address (rather than all interfaces)
05 November 2018
- Fix bugs that can cause the command-line checker to emit broken JSON output
- Allow
dppx
andx
and units in media queries
29 August 2018
- CSS: Allow unit-less values for stroke-width and other from-SVG props
- CSS: Bring checking up to date w/ CSS Align3; support font-display
23 July 2018
- Disable logging in the language detector
22 July 2018
- Allow the
decoding
attribute for theimg
element - Allow the
allow
attribute for theiframe
element (initial support) - Align ARIA checking further with ARIA in HTML spec requirements
- Restore the language-detection feature to vnu.jar command-line checker
- Ensure vnu.jar is always runnable under Java8, even if built under Java9
24 March 2018
- Add new major (optional) feature to command-line checker, Web-based checker, and network API to check CSS documents (in addition to HTML documents)
- Add new major feature to check that
style
element contents andstyle
attribute values in HTML documents are valid CSS - Add new (optional) feature to command-line checker to check SVG documents
- Add new option to command-line checker for specifying User-Agent string
- Add Dockerfile to Docker Hub https://hub.docker.com/r/validator/validator/
- Add ability to Web-based checker to check SVG documents by file upload
- Emit error (not warning) for HTML4/XHTML1 strict doctypes
- Further restrict
script[type]
andstyle[type]
- Allow the
autocapitalize
global attribute - Allow the
slot
attribute (for Shadow DOM interaction) - Allow the
allowpaymentrequest
attribute for theiframe
element - Allow only one non-hidden
main
element per document - Allow only
html
,body
,div
,form
, custom elements asmain
ancestor - Allow
</caption>
end tag to be omitted - Allow
role=none
whererole=presentation
is allowed - Allow
role=rowgroup
element to be contained inrole=table
element - Allow
role=row
element to be contained inrole=table
element - Allow more values for
aria-haspopup
per current ARIA spec - Allow more ARIA states & properties for
role=menuitem
- Allow CSP
prefetch-src
directive (updated to Salvation 2.4.0) - Disallow all character encodings other than UTF-8
- Disallow
script[charset]
- Disallow nested interactive ARIA roles
- Disallow the
dropzone
attribute - Disallow the
menuitem
element - Fix bug that caused the checker to incorrectly treat
input[type]
values case-sensitively when doing particular checks
07 October 2017
- Fix bug that made the vnu.jar
--Werror
option not work as expected - Make vnu.jar exit 0 if all errors have been filtered out
06 October 2017
- Allow DPUB roles on more elements (per ARIA in HTML spec updates)
- Add
--Werror
option to the vnu.jar command-line checker. The option causes the checker to exit non-zero if any warnings are encountered (even if there are no errors). - Fix mismatch that caused message-filtering failures
- Fix memory leak in language detector (patch from @tgyurci)
- Stop reporting HTML4-specific parse errors for HTML4-doctype docs
20 August 2017
- Allow
script[nomodule]
- Allow
hover
,any-hover
,pointer
, andany-pointer
media features - Allow
@scope
,@updateviacache
,@workertype
forlink[rel=serviceworker]
- Allow
&;
(don’t report it as “&
did not start a character reference”) - Add
acceptlanguage
query parameter, to specify an Accept-Language request-header value for checker to send when fetching remote documents - Update CSP checking to Salvation 2.3.0 https://github.com/shapesecurity/salvation/releases/tag/v2.3.0
26 June 2017
- Add new major feature to filter out (drop/ignore/suppress) errors/warnings by regex. See https://github.com/validator/validator/wiki/Message-filtering
- Replace a case of “Attribute "foo" not allowed on element "param" in this context” wording in error message with “Attribute "foo" not allowed on element "param" at this point” (for consistent working for that error between the command-line checker and the web-based checker).
- Disallow the
contextmenu
attribute andtype=contextmenu
andtype=toolbar
for themenu
element. - Allow
link[rel=serviceworker]
- Allow floating-point numbers in attribute values to start with decimal point
- Allow
a[href]
in SVG wherevera[xlink:href]
is allowed - Allow the
focusable
andtabindex
attributes on SVG elements - Fix bug that disallowed
progress
&meter
aslabel[for]
targets - Default to text/html for checking file uploads
- Emit warnings for use of
rel={copyright,previous}
- Prevent Bulgarian ➡ Russian misidentifications in language detector
- Skip figcaption elements when running the language detector
26 March 2017
- Allow
color
attribute withlink[rel="mask-icon"]
- Allow
meta[name]
to haveitemref
/itemscope
/itemtype
/itemid
- Allow
allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation
iniframe[sandbox]
- Stop hiding “sectioning roots” headings in “Heading-level outline”
- Change error for
role=none
withimg[alt=""]
to warning - Fix from @xfq for longstanding bug in “Show source” behavior in Web UI
- Fix from @xfq for controlling some runtime params for HTTP behavior
- Fix from @zcorpan to drop unneeded warning for
<menu type=toolbar>
- Make “Corrupt GZIP trailer” a non-error
- Add
--asciiquotes
option to vnu.jar command-line checker - Skip lang detection of elements w/ lang attributes not matching
html[lang]
- Drop Bulgarian lang detection, to prevent Russian misidentification
- Update Estonian/Catalan lang profiles, to prevent Russian misidentification
- Update ICU4J to 58.2
06 February 2017
- Fix bug in language detector that when running the vnu.jar command-line checker on a list of documents caused it to sometimes misidentify the language of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc., documents. The bug also caused the memory used by the checker to increase as the number of documents checked at the same time increased, and caused performance to degrade.
- Allow
aria-required
attribute everywhererequired
attribute is allowed - Add
--exit-zero-always
option to vnu.jar command-line checker - Fix longstanding bug around code for identifying overlapping cells in table-integrity checker (the bug somewhat frequently gets hit when checking Wikipedia pages but otherwise in the wild gets hit only extremely rarely)
30 January 2017
- Fix bug that broke vnu.jar command-line checking of URLs
- Fix bug in
rel="shortcut icon"
checking - Add
nu.client.EmbeddedValidator
for use as library by other Java apps - Disallow
tfoot
beforetbody
15 January 2017 This release adds the following changes to the vnu.jar command-line checker that had already been made available in the Web-based checker in the 17.0.1 release.
- Allow custom elements (names containing “-”; e.g.,
<foo-bar>
) - Allow anything in
template
element subtrees (exclude from checking)
08 January 2017
- New language-detection feature; warns for missing/wrong
html[lang]
- New option
--no-langdetect
forvnu.jar
disables language detection - Allow custom elements (names containing “-”; e.g.,
<foo-bar>
) - Allow the
is
attribute (for custom elements) - Allow ARIA 1.1 roles/states/properties
- Warn for viewport values that restrict resizing
- Allow
div
indl
, to groupdt
+dd
sets - Allow anything in
template
element subtrees (exclude from checking) - Allow
link[rel=preload]
in body - Disallow
sizes
attribute on non-iconlink
- Allow
<link rel=apple-touch-icon sizes=…>
- Allow comments before doctype (warning dropped)
- Allow
<video playsinline>
- Allow
<iframe allowusermedia>
- Warn for
sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin"
- New option to check error pages (404s and other non-200 responses)
- Allow
link[nonce]
- Disallow
input[datetime]
- Disallow
mediagroup
attribute - Allow
menu[type=popup]
, disallowmenu[type=context]
- Disallow non-http/https URLs in
a[ping]
- Allow
referrerpolicy
attribute - Warn for
html[manifest]
(obsolete) - Disallow
keygen
(obsolete) - Warn for
about:legacy-compat
in doctype - Align SVG+ARIA checking with ARIA requirements in current SVG spec
- Allow
h1
-h6
&hgroup
inlegend
- Ignore SSL errors when checking remote documents
- Allow
script[type=module]
(supported in Edge but not in other UAs yet) - Disallow content in
iframe
(must be empty) - Make
vnu.jar
check.xhtml
files using XML-specific RelaxNG grammar - Allow
th[abbr]
- Allow any value in SVG
class
attribute (not just XML-compatible names) - Disallow HTML4/XHTML1 Transitional doctype
- Allow CSP
require-sri-for
directive (updated to Salvation 2.2.0) - Allow any element or text as content of SVG
desc
- Allow SVG
vector-effect=non-scaling-stroke
- Allow only text in
rp
- Disallow multiple
meta[name=description]
- Disallow URLs with port values greater than 65535
- Disallow
<input name=isindex>
- Disallow empty
autocomplete
attribute
29 June 2016
- JSON/gnu message formats updated to ensure doc URL is always included
<!-->
(IE conditional comment end) is now (again) a non-error<template>
contents are now hidden from outline views
20 June 2016
- fixes problem that made the release jars unusable with Scala
sbt test
- adds “Heading-level outline” in Web UI; shows simple h1-h6 hierarchy
18 June 2016
- link[rel=stylesheet] in body now non-error (body-OK)
- rel=dns-prefetch|preconnect|prefetch|preload|prerender non-error+body-OK
- style[scoped] now error
- iframe[seamless] now error
--
(consecutive hyphens) within a comment now non-error- new specific error for
--!>
at end of a comment - new specific error for
<!--
within a comment - multiple meta[charset] now error
autocomplete
checking now aligned with current spec- label[form] now error
- a|area[rel=noopener] now non-error
- allow-presentation/allow-orientation-lock in iframe[sandbox] non-error
- label-less empty option now non-error if datalist child
- section[role=navigation|complementary|banner] now non-error
3 March 2016
- Made
minlength
a non-error forinput[type=password]
/input[type=text]
- Made multiple values in
integrity
a non-error - Made
<time>
with element children an error if nodatetime
specified - Improved CSP checking (now using Salvation 2.0.1)
- [WebUI] Dropped “Using the schema…”/“The Content-Type was…” Info msgs
- [WebUI] Added some autofocus of URL field and Message Filtering button
- [WebUI] Footer now tells whether document was served w/ charset param
- [WebUI] Fixed bug/regression in Image Report image display
- [build] Fixed bug caused by Rhino team building their jar with Java6
- [build] Fixed some problems with running build script on Windows
- [build] Made build script work with Python 3 (not just Python 2)
1 January 2016
- Java8 is now required to run the checker (and to build it).
- Made the
<meta http-equiv=content-security-policy content="...">
element a non-error & added syntax checking of itscontent
attribute and checking of the value of the Content-Security-Policy HTTP header. - Made the Content Security Policy
nonce
attribute a non-error. - Aligned
on*
event-handler-attribute checking with spec. - Aligned
iframe[sandbox]
checking with spec. - Made
minlength
attribute a non-error. - Dropped “heading needed” warning for cases where
aria-label
found. - Made unescaped ampersand a non-error in, e.g.
href="foo?bar=1&baz=2"
. - Added error for
img[alt=""]
w/role
!=presentation
. - Made
role=switch
a non-error. - Made
role=group
forheader
&footer
a non-error. - Made
role=search
forform
a non-error. - Made the Subresource Integrity
integrity
attribute a non-error and added syntax checking for it. - Refined bad-URL error message to indicate which character is invalid.
- Refined Web UI "Message Filtering" to show total error/warning counts
- Refined Web UI to show green if there are 0 errors or warnings to show
- Fixed "
input[type=hidden]
label descendants" bug (@takenspc patch) - Refined Web UI to remove background colors and increase font size
- Made a variety of refinements and fixes to ARIA role checking.
- Made
ol>li[role=menuitem]
&ol>li[role=tab]
non-errors. - Added warnings for use of ARIA roles with implicit-semantics elements.
- Made nesting of
time
elements a non-error. - Made checker ignore
input[type=hidden]
label descendants in checks. - Improved errors for obsolete media types/features.
- Fixed bug in checking of the content model for the
ruby
element.
29 June 2015
- Added error messages for deprecated CSS media types/features.
- Changed checking of the
accept
attribute for input[type=file] to allow file extensions in the value (per spec). - Added error for documents that have multiple
autofocus
attributes. - Made the
<rb>
and<rtc>
elements non-errors. - Made use of
data-*
attributes for SVG & MathML elements non-errors. - Made use of HTML content in the SVG
<desc>
,<title>
, and<metadata>
elements a non-error (per spec). - Changed error message for the
inputmode
attribute to a warning. - Fixed a bug that caused spurious error to be emitted for ID references
in
aria-controls
andaria-labelledby
with trailing whitespace. - Fixed a bug that prevented the command-line checker from being able to check URLs when run in a Windows environment. (patch from @mariusj)
- Added option to disable log4j when using Java API. (patch from @abrin)
12 April 2015
- Fixed regression that caused spurious errors for
input[type=email]
. - Fixed regression in war caused by missing jar needed for gzip handling.
28 March 2015
- Renamed from “Nu HTML Checker” to “Nu Html Checker”.
- Improved error messages for
input[type]
attribute mismatches. - Added support for checking
object[typemustmatch]
per-spec. - Added error message for
title
element that only has whitespace. - Dropped all
meta[name]
checking. Any arbitrarymeta[name]
value is now accepted unchecked. - Made a couple select/option error messages more precise.
- Added
useragent
parameter, for allowing you to specify any arbitrary user-agent string for the checker to use when fetching remote documents. - Added option to limit maximum number of errors shown. Exposed thru
nu.validator.messages.limit
Java system prop &--messages-limit
option for the build script. Controls limit on maximum number of messages the checker service will report for a single document before stopping with a “Too many messages” fatal error. - Make the API/CLI (command-line interface) emit source extracts &
“hilite” info. When you set the
--format
option tojson
,xml
,xhtml
, orhtml
(but notgnu
ortext
), the output now includes:- an extract from the doc source (
extract
field in JSON output) - which extract part to hilight (JSON
hiliteLength
&hiliteStart
) - error range starting line/column (JSON
firstColumn
&firstLine
)
- an extract from the doc source (
- Added full support for checking documents at SNI origins.
- Fixed regression that caused CLI/API to parse .xhtml docs as text/html instead of using the XML parser.
- Changed backend handling for the case when the “promiscuous-ssl” option is on (that is, when you’re requesting the doc-fetching backend ignore any SSL/TLS cert errors). This should be a transparent change.
- Now available from (Maven) Central Repository (nu.validator.validator).
- Made a number of look&feel refinements to the Web frontend.
- Replaced all Jena IRI code dependencies with dependency on galimatias.
- Updated doc-fetching backend to Apache HTTP Components HttpClient 4.4.
- Upgraded to Jetty 9.2.9 & upgraded many other build/run dependencies to latest versions; e.g., log4j 1.2.17, Apache Commons Codec 1.10.
- Dropped some dependencies that aren’t actually needed.
- Changed build to cut dependency download size from ~300MB down to ~16MB.
- Made change to force java to always use Saxon instead of Xalan.
- Renamed all org.whattf classes to nu.validator.
- Did large reorganization/consolidation of sources.
- Added
--javaversion
option, to generate class files targeted for particular VM versions (compiles for Java6/1.6 by default).
- added new "
sizes
attr required whensrcset
specifies width" check - added
--skip-non-html
option to CLI; http://goo.gl/sKjRD5 This change alters the default CLI handling of non-HTML files. Before the CLI by default skipped any files without .html, .htm, .xhtml, or .xht extensions; instead now by default all files found are checked, regardless of extension. The--skip-non-html
option provides the old default behavior: it make the checker skip any files without .html, .htm, .xhtml, or .xht extensions. - added
--javaversion
option to build script and changed default build behavior to now generate vnu.jar/vnu.war builds that can run in Java6 VMs (as well as in any newer VMs). To generate a vnu.jar/vnu.war build with a newer/different VM target, use, e.g.,--javaversion=1.8
. - added
--stacksize
option to build script & removed harcoded stack size - fixed several bugs in
sizes
checking - fixed position reporting of bad character refs in
title
&textarea
- fixed ARIA checking to allow
li[role=separator]
&time[role=timer]
- refined content-type check to treat
.csl
uploads as application/xml - refined "unexpected content-type" error msg to include URL of document
- refined a few things in TestRunner
- updated Rhino dependency to rhino1_7R5
- made SVG
<style>
not require thetype
attribute - added initial (liberal) support for ARIA in SVG
- dropped error for
X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge
HTTP header. Thx @zcorpan - dropped error for
meta[http-equiv=X-UA-Compatible][content=IE=Edge]
- added version info to jar manifest file
- made nu.validator.client.TestRunner exit non-zero for test failures
- made build script explicitly request Python2. Thx @kurosawa-takeshi
- code cleanup to build script and some Java sources. Thx @cvrebert
- brought reporting of bad IDs in
form
attr into compliance with spec (see validator/validator.github.io#8 and thanks again to https://github.com/cavweb20)
- fixed bug that broke json & xml message output (see validator/validator.github.io#5 and thanks to https://github.com/cavweb20)
- added support for the
<picture>
element - improved ARIA support for various table elements
- made refinements to outline handling
- added experimental warnings for some heading/outline issues
- improved checking for
meta@name
andlink@rel
values - CLI now exits with
1
if any errors are found - CLI no longer says
XHTML element
in error messages - switched to galimatias for URL checking
- updated to latest ICU4J
- release now includes WAR file
- initial
vnu.jar
release