What's New in CSE HTML Validator
Version 12 contains major new improvements:
- Improved support for HTML5
- Improved support for CSS3
- Improved accessibility checking
- Improved RDFa support
- Improved checking (syntax, SEO, links)
- Improved configurability
- Improved speed and efficiency
- Improved Batch Wizard (Pro+)
- Many other improvements, updates, and refinements
Tip: To update, use the Help->Check for Updates option in the editor.
Version 12.0020 Version 12.0020 is now available!
Version 12.0024 - MINOR v12 UPDATE - (released 2013-01-03)
- Fixed some cookie handling bugs
- New TNPL functions like trim(), ltrim(), and rtrim(); new 'variable functions' like isSet(), ltrim(), rtrim(), toLower(), toUpper(), trim(), and unset()
- Other miscellaneous tweaks, updates, and improvements
Version 12.0020 - MINOR v12 UPDATE - (released 2012-12-17)
- Stability & performance improvements
- Miscellaneous bug fixes, including one that could cause a program crash in certain situations
- Help update
- Other miscellaneous tweaks, updates, and improvements
Version 12.0010 - MINOR v12 UPDATE - (released 2012-11-06)
- Validator: Some changes & improvements to table structure checking
- Validator: In TNPL, added a new hasSiblingElement() function and added functionality for getLocation()
- Fix: Bug that could cause a crash when validating with 3rd party programs like TopStyle
- Fix: The Pretty Print/Fix (HTML Tidy) Tool (which has been upgraded to support HTML5) should now work on Windows XP
- Other miscellaneous tweaks, updates, and improvements
Version 12.0000 - MAJOR NEW RELEASE - (released 2012-10-29)
- Editor: Updates to the inserter toolbars, and the inserters now support new "prependeachline" and "appendeachline" attributes for more functionality (like instant lists and table cells from selected lines)
- Editor: New F4 shortcut key to repeat the last text insertion or text selection/sort command
- Editor: New option to export the link checker results to a CSV file (includes all the fields shown in the Links tab)
- Editor: Other miscellaneous interface & other improvements
- Integrated Web Browser: New option to clear browser history
- Validator: Polyglot document checking (with new "DOCTYPE Control" page in the Validator Engine Options)
- Validator: Improved MathML support for "math" elements in HTML5 documents
- Validator: Warnings about CDATA sections are now suppressed if the CDATA markers appear to be commented out
- Validator: Generates an error message when a new "cseignore" block is detected in another "cseignore" block (use "cseignore" blocks to exclude parts of documents from being checked)
- Validator: Improved validation & syntax checking, improved validator messages
- Validator: Improved accessibility checking (such as adding more checks)
- Validator: Major changes & improvements to TNPL (the "tag name programming language"). It's now case-sensitive, and supports variable arrays, new comparison operators, and more.
- Link Checking: Notification when the use of the experimental "application/x-javascript" or obsolete "text/javascript" MIME type is detected
- Link Checking: Improved handling of "file://" links when they include query strings and anchors
- Tool: The Pretty Print/Fix (HTML Tidy) Tool has been upgraded to support HTML5
- Batch Wizard: Supports greater customizations using a 'user functions' file. Write your own functions in TNPL to customize Batch Wizard jobs.
- Batch Wizard: New addTarget() function in TNPL to dynamically add targets to the target list; can be used to POST to forms, including login forms (enterprise edition only)
- Batch Wizard: Can now specify specific extensions to exclude from following
- Batch Wizard: The line:char location of "meta" tag refresh links are now noted in link reports
- Command line: new "-inifile" and "-msgwindow" options
- Documentation: Improved & updated (especially the online web help version)
- Cookie support added for Open from the Web, the Batch Wizard, and the link checker.
- Improved performance & efficiency in multiple areas
- Guaranteed compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8 (adds official Windows 8 support)
- Many other improvements, updates, bug fixes, and refinements
Version 11.0230 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2012-08-27)
- Miscellaneous minor fixes, improvements, and updates
- Expected to be the final v11 release
Version 11.0220 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2012-06-27)
- Batch Wizard: Fix for the possibility of bad XML output in the master link report (enterprise edition)
- Validator: Memory leak fix
- Other: Miscellaneous minor fixes and updates
Version 11.0200 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2012-04-04)
- Batch Wizard: New option to include/exclude the "Order" column in link reports
- Batch Wizard: New option to include/exclude a new optional "Line:Char" column in link reports
- Editor: Improved Alt+W performance
- Validator: Improved WCAG 2.0 accessibility checking (more checks & messages)
- Validator: Added support for the "sizes" attribute for the "link" element
- Validator: Updated JSLint
- Validator: Fixed bug with not recogizing the IDs in the "headers" attribute with certain table layouts
- Validator: Fixed bug with progress bar repositioning
- Validator: New tag name programming language functions: endsWithCase(), endsWithNoCase(), getAttIndexForStartTag(), getAttValueForStartTag(), getAttValueLocationForStartTag(), getAttLocationForStartTag(), hasAttForStartTag(), hasChildElement()
- Validator: Other new tag name programming language improvements like support for integers in 0xH format and a new locid 10 for getLocation()
- Validator: New (NOT whitespace) built-in attribute value
- Other: Other miscellaneous fixes, changes, updates, and improvements
Version 11.0100 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2012-02-21)
- Batch Wizard: HTML reports now use HTML5
- Batch Wizard: Improvements to MLR (master link report) HTML output
- Editor: Bug fix with the integrated web browser and path mapping (sometimes didn't work)
- Link Checker: New option to slow down the link checker (and thus reduce server load)
- Validator: Many updates & improvement to both the HTML & CSS checker/validator
- Validator: Accessibility checking improvements & fixes
- Validator: New (NOT whitespace) built-in attribute value
- Other: Other miscellaneous fixes, changes, and updates
Version 11.0032 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2011-12-14)
- Batch Wizard: Improvements to memory usage efficiency (in some cases)
- Validator: Began adding "basic" SVG support (attributes of SVG elements are not checked)
- Validator: Fixed a bug that could cause an exception for some types of messages
- Validator: Fixed a bug with the recognition of elements with no attributes that are minimized
- Validator: Other minor updates and additions to the configuration file such as some warning messages for some HTML5 attributes and elements that currently have no browser support
- Installer: Requires fewer clicks to install (& other minor changes)
- Other: Other miscellaneous fixes, changes, and updates
Version 11.0020 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2011-11-15)
- CSS Validator: Fixed some issues with comments
- Validator: Fixed some issues running JSLint on some systems and in some situations
- Validator Engine Options: Fixes to 'Message ID' and 'Path Mapping' pages
- Other: Other miscellaneous fixes, changes, and updates
Version 11.0010 - MINOR v11 UPDATE - (released 2011-11-09)
- Batch Wizard/Validator Engine: Improved detection of character encoding in some cases
- Link Checking: Improvements when dealing with links with unencoded space characters
- Link Checking: In 'Link check only' mode, extracts links from CSS that were previously ignored in 'Link check only' mode (these links were not being ignored in typical validation mode)
- Link Checking: Excludes (ignores) links with collapsed PHP, ASP, etc.; they are not added to the array of extracted links
- Validator Engine Options: Fixed 'Perform linting only when JavaScript is detected' option wasn't always showing the correct option setting
- Other: Other miscellaneous fixes, changes, and updates
Version 11.0000 (v11.00 RELEASE) - MAJOR NEW RELEASE - (released 2011-10-25)
- Editor: New Links->Export Links to Text (bad) in the Results Window's popup menu that only shows the error/warning links
- Editor: New menu and toolbar icons for a better look
- Editor: Square orange icons are shown in front of document names in the tabs for unsaved documents
- Editor: Other interface improvements
- Integrated Web Browser: Will now render pages in IE9 mode (if IE9 is installed)
- Integrated Web Browser: New 'Quick Doc' menu for the integrated web browser to quickly move or dock the integrated web browser
- Integrated Web Browser: New 'Silent Mode' option to suppress dialogs
- Batch Wizard: XML output support (enterprise edition only)
- Batch Wizard: Optionally check for the same titles and the same meta descriptions across different URLs
- Batch Wizard: The wait time before each URL request can now be set in milliseconds instead of seconds for finer control
- Batch Wizard: New "Append message IDs to the message text" option in the Report Options->Report Format page
- Validator: Improved HTML5 and CSS3 support and syntax checking
- Validator: Added WAI-ARIA support
- Validator: Can now specify a "user functions" file that contains user functions for powerful customization possibilities
- Validator: Integration with JSLint by Douglas Crockford (new window), and new "JSLint messages only" validation mode
- Validator: Generates an improved document structure view; implied end tags are now marked with "(i)", and other improvements; to see this, make sure the "Document Structure" window is visible in the editor
- Validator: Improved input control for specifying excluded search engine keywords (now uses a memo control)
- Validator: Other improvements to the Validator Engine Options Dialog Box
- Validator: New built-in attribute values: (int-non-neg-html5), and more
- Validator: New tag name programming language functions: isAttValueEmpty(), matchRegEx(), replaceStringCase(), replaceStringNoCase(), and more
- Validator: Recognizes "tel:" protocol
- Validator: Many other improvements and updates to the validator messages
- CSS Validator: New /*cseignore*/ and /*/cseignore*/ comments for CSS documents to excluding checking of sections of CSS
- CSS Validator: Now checks the "box-shadow" property (it has been re-added to the specification)
- CSS Validator: Improved CSS3 support
- Link Checker: Support for file:// protocol
- Tools: Improvements to the Quick Quote Attribute Value tool & addition of the onTool_QuoteAttVal_Value() function
- General: Windows 2000 is no longer supported
- General: General performance and efficiency improvements throughout
- General: New functions are used to uppercase & lowercase text, which should fix issues with certain alphabets like the Cyrillic alphabet
- General: Updated & improved documentation
- General: Various updated components
Version 10.0211 (v10.0211) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2011-06-02)
- Validator: Improvements to HTML5 syntax checking, particularly with obsolete attributes
- Validator: HTML5 DOCTYPEs will now automatically disable browser extension categories (this behavior can be disabled by unchecking the new flag 127)
- Validator: Performance improvements, especially significant for documents with many "id" attributes
- Other: A few other minor updates, fixes, and improvements
Version 10.0204 (v10.0204) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2011-05-10)
- Editor: Fixed a bug that could cause an access violation in certain situations, like opening a document from the web using a username and password
- Batch Wizard: The 'Grand Totals Report' now includes links to the relevant sections in multi-page reports
- Batch Wizard: Fixed a bug where Master Link Report and Important Messages Report were being generated for single page reports even when the options to do so were not selected
- Batch Wizard: Fixed possible issue that could cause a crash on shutdown
- Validator: Minor changes and fixes to some validator messages
- General: Other miscellaneous changes & improvements
Version 10.0200 (v10.0200) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2011-04-26)
- Editor: New Results Window context/pop-up menu option "Copy Link to Clipboard" when a link is selected in the Links tab
- Editor: When opening a document and trying to determine the encoding, now looks for "@charset" at the top of the document
- Batch Wizard: Improved design and use of a new worker thread significantly improves job performance, especially on machines with more than one CPU/core
- Batch Wizard: New "Master Link Report" lists all error and warning links on one report page
- Batch Wizard: Automatically retries downloading targets up to 3 times for certain failures (like timeouts)
- Batch Wizard: Can now pause running jobs
- Batch Wizard: Now asks "Are you sure?" when trying to stop a running job
- Batch Wizard: New "Auto Scroll" option in the Batch Progress Tab's context/pop-up menu; can disable to be able to scroll to see the progress while a job is still running
- Batch Wizard: Miscellaneous other improvements
- Validator: Improved encoding and character set checking when specified in the HTTP headers (when available), a XML declaration, and/or a "meta" tag (they are checked to make sure they are recognized and are in agreement with each other)
- Validator: Improved handling of missing "cols" and "rows" attributes for "textarea" (they are not required for HTML5, but warnings are generated for HTML 4 based documents if they're missing)
- Validator: Improved handling of extra quotation mark characters (under certain circumstances) in tags
- Validator: Improved WCAG 2.0 and general accessibility checking (some new messages added)
- Validator: Updated lists of recognized Unicode characters and top level domain names
- Validator: New tag name program functions: hasValue(), hasNoValue(); New integer keyword: hasHTTPHeaders
- Validator: Minor updates to HTML5 support
- General: Uses a new method for calculating processing times that should be impervious to system clock changes; this should prevent possible issues caused by automatic or manual clock changes while HTML Validator is keeping track of time, which it does for various functions like validations, link checking, and Batch Wizard jobs.
- General: New portable mode for USB flash drive installation (BETA) - see the forum thread about the portable feature for more information
- General: New title bar in the three main options dialogs
- General: Memory efficiency and performance improvements
- General: Other bug fixes, minor improvements & updates
Version 10.0120 (v10.0120) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2011-01-25)
- Batch Wizard: New option to turn off repeating the important/error messages that are generated during a Batch Wizard in the summary page of the report; previously this could not be turned off
- Batch Wizard: Memory usage improvement when link checking is off (may be significant in some cases)
- Validator: Fixed a performance problem that may significantly increase validation time under rare circumstances
- Other bug fixes, minor improvements & updates
Version 10.0110 (v10.0110) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2011-01-15)
- Validator: (Important bug fix) Going to the Validator Engine->Message Output->Message ID options page in the Validator Engine Options and then exiting the Validator Engine Options with "OK" instead of "Cancel" could cause corruption (loss) of the message ID configuration
- Validator: The "Template" tool now supports $"CURRENTYEAR"
- Validator: JSON output now includes (if available) "messageflag", "messageflag2", and "messageid" variables for each message, and the message text is now stripped of any preceding flag numbers in square braqckets
- Validator: Improved DLL load time
- Other minor improvements
Version 10.0100 (v10.01) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2011-01-05)
- Editor: Added a new tip that appears for documents containing lines exceeding the maximum line length to parse, and a new option in the Other Editor page in the Editor Options to easily change the maximum line length to parse (previously it required making a registry change).
- Editor: Updates & enhancements to the inserters, some significant, especially to the JavaScript and PHP inserters
- Editor: New inserter config file attribute "shiftprependtext" allows the specified text value to be prepended to the inserttext when SHIFT is held down
- Editor: If a file is chosen from the recent files list and it can't be opened, then an option to remove the file from the list is now added to the dialog that displays
- Editor: New JavaScript file filter (for all installs & updates) and *.js added to the "Web Files" file filter (for new installs only)
- Editor: Improved auto-detection of character encoding when opening documents
- Editor: Changed HTML 4 document templates to utf-8 for new installs (will not overwrite current templates)
- Editor: The File->Open from Recent Folder and File->Save As to Recent Folder menu options are now sorted so you can find the desired folder quicker
- Editor: Fixed some printing bugs; some printing options (like the page header and footer) may need to be reset/restored if they were previously set to non-default values
- Editor: Minor GUI fixes and updates to some parser syntax schemes
- Batch Wizard: Improved navigation bar and report format in Batch Wizard reports
- Batch Wizard: New Batch Wizard option to check memory and stop processing if it's too low (defaults to enabled); this should help avoid crashes when processing large numbers of targets
- Batch Wizard: If important/error messages are generated during a Batch Wizard run, then they are now replicated in the summary page of the report
- Batch Wizard: New visual display of keywords (more frequently used keywords are displayed in a larger size) if enabled in the Validator Engine Options, Search Engine page
- Batch Wizard: Minor change of report page title format - if processing a target list file, now includes the filename (without path) of the target list being processed and the filename (with full path) in the default footer
- Validator: New repeated word validator message (new option in the Spell Checking page in the Validator Engine Options)
- Validator: Certain error messages now include the version number & other minor changes
- Validator: ICRA label checking is now disabled by default and a new flag 125 has been added which can be unchecked to re-enable ICRA label checking. FOSI has discontinued the ICRA labeling engine.
- Validator: The message about tables not having the same number of cells in each row now includes line number information, making it much easier to find the row with the bad number of cells
- Validator: The "Quick Quote Attribute Values" tool now quotes attribute values in "script" and "style" tags
- Validator: New flag 126 that generates warning messages for insecurely delivered content on secure pages (if it is or can be presumed that the page is securely delivered)
- Validator: New JSON output for another 3rd-party integration output option
- General: Faster startups
- General: Performance, efficiency and memory usage optimizations (some memory optimizations may be significant in some cases)
- General: Miscellaneous bug fixes and changes
Version 10.0031 (v10.00) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2010-09-20)
- Editor: Added a new Validate main menu and made improvements and changes to some menus and shortcut assignments, including adding keyboard shortcuts for performing validations with different "validation modes".
- Editor: Added new Flag Options option to the Results Window context/pop-up menu.
- Editor: If an error occurs while trying to open a document, then now offers the option to try again in the error dialog.
- Editor: Improved the copying and pasting of registration information from the clipboard in case the registration information is all on one line.
- Editor: New File->Open File Location menu option.
- Editor: New block selection mode when holding down the Alt key.
- Batch Wizard: Fixed a problem where incorrect report files might be deleted under certain circumstances (if option to delete old report files is checked).
- Validator: Fixed a bug that caused the keyword density message not to be generated if spell checking was disabled.
- Validator: The spelling and keyword density comment messages will now be generated even if comment messages are disabled (because they have a separate and dedicated option to control it).
- Validator: Improved standard validator error message for invalid empty attribute values.
Version 10.0020 (v10.00) - MINOR UPDATE - (released 2010-08-03)
- Fixed a bug that could cause an access violation, most likely if the link checker path mappings are edited.
- Access to some of the link checking options and some affected menu options is now locked out if the Validator Engine Options dialog is opened while a link check is running.
- Now displays deprecation messages for more HTML 4.0 deprecated attributes like "align", "border", "hspace", "vspace", which may not have been displayed before as might have been expected.
- Documentation and program changes, improvements, and minor changes.
Version 10.0000 (v10.00) - MAJOR NEW RELEASE - (released 2010-07-01)
- Validator Engine
- Added preliminary HTML5 support. NOTE: HTML5 is still a work in progress.
- Added WCAG 2.0 checking.
- Added checking to support Canadian Common Look and Feel Standards for the Internet 2.0.
- New option to disable messages by exact text match (using a case insensitive compare). This provides even finer control of what messages can be disabled.
- Faster validations due to many miscellaneous performance and efficiency improvements.
- Checks for unrecognized values for the "rel" attribute for "link" and "a" elements.
- Improved accessibility checking and new accessibility tip message.
- Improved, updated, and new SEO (search engine optimization) messages.
- The keyword density message now includes the percentage instead of just the keyword count.
- Ignores RDFa attributes instead of generating 'unknown attribute' errors for them.
- New option to improve HTML Tidy messages that, when enabled, adds message IDs and makes other changes to some of the HTML Tidy messages.
- Checks for unescaped less-than characters in attribute values in XHTML documents.
- Added attribute value built-in types: (Boolean-html5), (float-html5), (float-non-neg-html5), (float-pos-html5), (media query list).
- Improved the analysis results for the attribute and attribute value analysis in the Configuration Editor. The attribute analysis now shows which elements and attribute groups include the selected attribute.
- Major redesign of the Validator Engine Options dialog to improve usability.
- New Message ID page in the Validator Engine Options to quickly view the message ID configuration and delete or disable/enable messages.
- Added some brightness/contrast checking based on WCAG formulas recommendations when WCAG 1.0 Priority 3 checking is enabled (such as when a foreground and background color is specified in a CSS declaration).
- Updated list of acceptable Unicode ranges from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt
- Various miscellaneous improvements and additions to the validator messages.
- Validator Engine (CSS)
- Added preliminary CSS3 support. NOTE: CSS3 is still a work in progress.
- Improvements to the CSS syntax checking messages, including improved suggestions for unknown or misspelled CSS properties.
- Improved auto-CSS document detection when the CSS document starts with an at-rule.
- Validator Engine (link checking)
- The link checker now displays comments about alt text and width and height attributes for image links.
- New "always bad" and "always good" link filters for link checking.
- Validator Engine (tag name programming language for advanced configuration programming)
- New special function onDocTypeFlagsChange() called when the value of doctypeflags is changed.
- Improvements to the tag name programming language, including performance and efficiency improvements.
- New integer and string keywords for improved code readability and performance.
- Editor
- New end tag auto complete option - just type "</" and the end tag is automatically completed - or press Ctrl+. to type in the entire end tag.
- New "dynamic help" feature that shows a context-sensitive help button on the main menu bar. Click the button (or press F1) to be taken to a web page for the relevant HTML element or CSS property. This feature can be disabled, if desired, using View->Menus->Dynamic Help.
- New Insert menu on the editor pop-up menu.
- New "Change References to Chars" and "Invert Case" options in the editor popup menu's Selection submenu.
- New "White space Characters" and "Duplicate Nonempty Lines" options in the editor popup menu's Selection->Remove submenu.
- Miscellaneous improvements to the editor pop-up menu, including the Selection submenu.
- Improved preview with the integrated web browser and now supports path mapping.
- When asking to disable or enable a flag, displays the flag description (if available) in the dialog.
- New File->Copy File Path to Clipboard menu option.
- New Reload toolbar button on the File toolbar.
- New dialog to confirm opening of any document that appears to be a CSE HTML Validator temporary file.
- Improved handling of validator message selection for improved responsiveness in some cases.
- Renamed the "Format and Fix HTML Tool" tool to the "Pretty Print/Fix" tool.
- New "Show splash/status window" option to disable the startup splash/status window for slightly decreased startup times.
- XML declarations and "html" start tags are now also inserted when inserting an XHTML DOCTYPE.
- Major redesign of the Editor Options dialog to improve usability.
- The "WB Source" tab that shows the source document in the integrated web browser can now be reloaded. When reload is chosen, a reload/refresh is done in the integrated web browser and the "WB Source" tab is updated.
- Improved options to insert dates and times. More date/time insert options have been added and now they also show an example string of what will be inserted.
- New "Reload All" option appears in certain reload dialogs to make reloading all changed files easier.
- When specifying relative files to open on the command line, now converts them to absolute paths to avoid possible problems when re-opening them during another run.
- Fixed a problem with the spell checker that caused it to (sometimes) not check all the words.
- Improved shutdown routine so if it is canceled, then all documents still remain opened.
- Faster startup.
- Batch Wizard
- Links in validator messages are now active links in the Batch Wizard reports.
- When launching the Batch Wizard from the program shortcut, it should now automatically reload the last target list.
- Major redesign of the Batch Wizard Options dialog to improve usability.
- Tools
- The "Quick Quote Attribute Values" tool doesn't quote the "/" character at the end of a tag.
- In the editor, menu options are dynamically created for each Pretty Print/Fix tool profile, allowing easier and faster access to multiple profiles.
- Command Line Processor (cmdlineprocessor.exe)
- The "-q" option to send a quit signal to the editor/Batch Wizard will now wait up to 10 seconds looking for an instance to send the quit signal to (this solves some possible timing issues) if no instance of the editor is found right away.
- Other
- Updates to the spelling dictionaries.
- Improvements and updates to the program documentation.
- Other miscellaneous updates, improvements and changes.
- Bug Fixes
- Miscellaneous bug fixes and other improvements and updates.
- Fixed a bug that caused improper encoding detection when reading some files in some cases.
- Fixed problem with HTTPS links not being checked from 3rd party software like TopStyle.