Anyone Notce W3C Validator Changes

[universal4]

Anyone else notice that all of a sudden, the w3c validator is complaining about ALL self closing tags?

I had one page knew I had a few css errors to fix, so I did that and reran the page and it is full of errors.

Now the entire site is showing a long list of self closing errors, and I am 100% sure the site was fine a few days ago as I had run all the pages through the validator to verify them and was down to the one page I mentioned above.

Here is just a few examples with content removed:

Self-closing tag syntax in text/html documents is widely discouraged; it’s unnecessary and interacts badly with other HTML features (e.g., unquoted attribute values). If you’re using a tool that injects self-closing tag syntax into all void elements, without any option to prevent it from doing so, then consider switching to a different tool.

From line 9, column 5; to line 9, column 113

php">↩ <meta name='robots' content='index, follow, max-image-preview:large, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1' />

Self-closing tag syntax in text/html documents is widely discouraged; it’s unnecessary and interacts badly with other HTML features (e.g., unquoted attribute values). If you’re using a tool that injects self-closing tag syntax into all void elements, without any option to prevent it from doing so, then consider switching to a different tool.

From line 13, column 2; to line 13, column 185

</title>↩ <meta name="description" content="content removed" />↩

Self-closing tag syntax in text/html documents is widely discouraged; it’s unnecessary and interacts badly with other HTML features (e.g., unquoted attribute values). If you’re using a tool that injects self-closing tag syntax into all void elements, without any option to prevent it from doing so, then consider switching to a different tool.

From line 14, column 2; to line 14, column 121

mes." />↩ <link rel="canonical" href="content removed" />↩

If you notice what some of them are, these are metas etc, and NONE of them were there 09-23 or 09-24 when I checked the site, page by page.

I have only just noticed this, and have not researched it much yet, but I have found this stackexchange article, that mentions it is not a verified standard yet.

To me this almost makes the validator completely useless.

I would be interested in hearing comments from anyone that has recently ran the validator on your sites and knew everything was fine and now suddenly its not.

Check your site guys, my guess is almost everyone's metas etc now all have errors that were not there last week.

If this is in fact becoming a standard, certainly yoast, rank math etc will need to update.

I do not always use self closing tags, but have very often used them for line breaks and some times in other areas as it has been an acceptable standard...for well a long time.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

Found the validator change log but they do NOT list today's change.
https://webval.validator.com.au/changes
The last change they show was in August
41505291 2022-08-18 Merge pull request #551 from Validators/feature/550-log4j-vulnerability

I can guarantee the change w3c made was the last few days as I had initially date stamped the day I rand a certain site with only 1 single page had errors and now entire site does.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

Only thing I found so far on the mailing list concerns svg files but I bet this will be everywhere in a few days.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public...dator/2022Sep/

Looks like they removed the warnings for the svg but they think its ok for meta and br

The validators (old and nu) now provide a warning against the use of the self-closing syntax. This is fine for void elements like <br> or <meta>.

Looks like all the seo plugins will have to be updated pretty in the coming days.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

This Github project appears to have some information on this.
https://github.com/validator/validat...a987703184839c

This is kludgey and should be reverted after a few days — after it’s run in production in the W3C service for long enough that we’ve collected accurate user-counter data for how many text/html documents that have been run through the checker contain self-closing tag syntax.

Rick
Universal4

[xecutable]

Why even bother with this validator. It's so irrelevant for 2022. Pop any of Google's websites and none of them pass. And if the mother of all SEO troubles doesn't care, doubt anyone else would care.

With the addition to so many new elements, html 5, wordpress block introduction and so on, doubt it can keep up with the newest trends, and I haven't ever seen anyone complete pass it unless you are running a .html page with a few words, pictures and links.

[universal4]

I think it has quite a bit of value finding silly little errors, extra < p > tags, missing brackets etc due to typos and such. At least I did up until a few days ago.

Fixing the html5 standard is fairly easy on wordpress, and even using some custom short tags and widgets I found it helpful and most often not difficult to get past most errors.

You might be correct that if on this latest change if the validator is suddenly going to fail on the many sites that use yoast automatically, then the days could be numbered.

Rick
Universal4

[universal4]

ok I found the link to the .nu version of the validation tool that at least at the current time ignores the /> self closing tag error.

https://html5.validator.nu/

Looks to me like yoast is putting many of the tags in, but think some might be inserted by wordpress itself but that is not confirmed.

Rcik
Universal4

[xecutable]

Cloudflare seems to block that second one.

[universal4]

Darn that is less than helpful, thanks for checking xecutable

Rick
Universal4