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building ssc

running ssc

ssc is a static site checker. It’s an opinionated HTML nit–picker. It’s a command line tool intended for people, like me, who hand code websites, to identify issues that should perhaps be addressed. Point it to a directory containing your website’s HTML (or XHTML, or SHTML, etc.), and it will analyse what it sees.

SSC analyses static X/HTML at source:

• HTML 1.0/+/2.0/3.0/3.2/4.00/4.01/5.0/5.1/5.2/5.3-draft;
• HTML living standard, Jan 2005 to Apr 2022;
• CSS 1/2.0/2.1/2.2;
• SVG 1.0/1.1/1.2 Tiny/1.2 Full/2.0/2.x draft Apr 2021;
• MathML 1/2/3/4-draft;
• XHTML 1.0/1.1/2.0/5.x;
• finds broken links (requires curl);
• processes server side includes, mostly; &
• analyses common microdata & RDFa ontologies,

with opinions on:

• standard English where dialect is required,
• perfectly legal but rather untidy HTML, &
• abhorrent HTML such as autoplay on video.

It does NOT:

• behave securely: its parser is holier than robin's cow;
• analyse or understand scripts;
• analyse or understand styles, beyond nicking class names from CSS; &
• analyse or understand XML or derivatives except as noted above.

It can output:

• 'repaired' HTML (not XHTML);
• HTML with resolved Server Side Includes;
• JSON summaries of microformat and microdata content;
• website statistical information; &
• updated website with datafile deduplication.

It compares to the following products:

• HTML Tidy can convert between HTML and XHTML, but checks few attributes and spots no broken links;
• Linkchecker takes orders of magnitude longer to scan a large site, and fails to report many broken links; &
• various HTML linters analyse individual files but not complete sites.