help.ubuntu.com claims to be HTML 5 but is not (but extremely close)

[Prateek Karandikar]

Binary package hint: ubuntu-docs

https://help.ubuntu.com/ claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but is not: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fhelp.ubuntu.com

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

Marking as invalid for ubuntu docs. I marked it as a bug against the ubuntu website.

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

Crap my bad help.ubuntu.com is under the ubuntu-docs umbrella.

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

Where does it say that its xhtml transitional and why does it matter?

[Shane Fagan (shanepatrickfagan)]

Ok I checked and I know what you are complaining about. Its invalid xhtml transitional. This isnt a problem have a look at http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com
The w3 validator looks at web markup very strictly so this isnt a bug that needs fixing.

[Prateek Karandikar (prateek.karandikar)]

Huh, how is youtube.com relevant to this? That's like saying "if Windows can have broken feature X, then so can we".

There are two issues here:

1. The page contradicts itself, by claiming to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional and not being XHTML 1.0 Transitional. An easy way to fix this is of course is to just get rid of the DOCTYPE. That still won't solve the bigger issue:

2. The page is not [X]HTML standard compliant. Ubuntu should set an example by following web standards, and not adopt the fix in "1" above.

And if you really want other examples, how about http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.debian.org , http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://fedoraproject.org/ , http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.opensuse.org , http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.redhat.com , http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.linux.org , http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.gimp.org , http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.inkscape.org ?

[Matthew East (mdke)]

Thanks for the bug. Given that help.ubuntu.com is generated from docbook xml using fairly standard stylesheets, most of these errors are likely to be caused by those stylesheets. We may have a look into this to see if we can improve things but it's not going to be high priority.

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

After looking more into this, it seems that we may be handling some of our custom XSLs incorrectly, particularly w.r.t default namespaces. I'll see if I can clean these up.

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

I've done some work in the Oneiric branch which now uses Mallard as our source and builds into HTML5. There are a few warnings left caused by the yelp-xsl tool used during the build, but I won't try to work around those as the pages validate without errors as they are.

I'll also work on the static html pages at the top level of help.ubuntu.com, but I'm not sure we'll make any changes to the existing generated documents for each release.

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

I pushed a fix for most of this into the Natty branch, but there is one error remaining. If anybody knows how to fix this, I'd be delighted to get a solution:

     Line 39, Column 88: document type does not allow element "form" here

     …ite('<form action="https://help.ubuntu.com/search.html" id="cse-search-box">');

Also, it looks like w3 may have updated their validator for HMTL5 as new errors are appearing from our Oneiric branch, I'll look into those as well.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

It's unclear to me how the ubuntu-docs task can be invalid, so re-opening it. Please don't invalidate a bug without explanation.

[Doug Smythies (dsmythies)]

If we want to keep this one open, then the title should be changed from:

help.ubuntu.com claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional but is not

to:

help.ubuntu.com claims to be HTML 5 but is not (but extremely close)

I'll fix the help.ubuntu.com glue files in a few days, during the 13.04 EOL deletion update. The one error in the index.html files is trivial.

The errors in the compiled Desktop docs and Serverguide are very minimal, and myself I wouldn't worry about it.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Right, Doug, I agree on all you said. My objection was of the formal kind, i.e. the bug is not and has never been invalid.

Updated the title.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

(I see no reason for this to be private, and the person responsible no longer has an LP account.)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Let's simply close this bug. (I for one can't see that the pages claim to comply with any specific standard nowadays, btw.)