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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 HTML at source:

• HTML tags / 1.0 / + / 2.0 / 3.0 / 3.2 / 4.00 / 4.01 / 5.0 / 5.1 / 5.2 / 5.3 / WhatWG July 2020,
• SVG 1.0 / 1.1,
• MathML 1 / 2 / 3,
• XHTML 1.0 / 1.1 / 2.0, –ish,
• broken links (requires curl),
• simple server side includes,
• schema.org microdata 2.x / 3.x / 4.0 / 5.0 / 6.0 / 7.x / 8.0 / 9.0 / 10.0, &
• microformats v1 / v2;

with opinions on:

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

It is incomplete. In particular, it does NOT:

• do what you want or expect,
• behave in an even vaguely secure manner: its parser is holier than the famous cow,
• process scripts, whether Javascript, ASP, PHP, etc.,
• process styles, except grabbing class names from CSS,
• process XML or any derivative beyond those noted above,
• process recent versions of SVG or MathML,
• process any version of WhatWG HTML except that from early July 2020, or
• process XHTML 5.0.

It produces:

• a list of issues it identifies, &
• site HTML statistics.

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 forgets to mention many broken links found by SSC;
• various HTML linters that analyse individual files, but not complete sites; &
• SSC is based on SWLC, which only checks links.