This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
The following simple document, when validating with direct input and “Show Outline” selected, does not show any outline (only the heading “Document Outline” and the text “Below is an outline for this document, automatically generated from the heading tags (<h1> through <h6>.)” appear): <!doctype html> <title>foo</title> <h1>aaa</h1> <h2>bbb</h2> http://validator.w3.org/nu/ shows the outline properly.
http://validator.w3.org/ doesn't support showing document outlines for HTML5 docs. It doesn't support a lot of things that http://validator.w3.org/nu/ does. The easy solution is just to use http://validator.w3.org/nu/ directly instead.
Since it seems, from the history of similar bug reports through the years, that the validator will not be modified to produce outline for HTML5 documents, this feature should be disabled from its user interface, i.e. when HTML5 validation is being performed, there should be no option for requesting an outline. Or at least there should be statement in the report saying that outline was not generated. Now everything in the user interface makes the user think that outline works for HTML5 but the outline is empty. This can be very confusing, and people look for explanations in their own documents, not in the validator pages (which probably don’t even mention this restriction). Perhaps simpler, disable HTML5 mode entirely http://validator.w3.org and point to http://validator.w3.org/nu/ for HTML5 validation. (If the reason for not having done this is that the latter is not ready or finalized yet, the counterargument is that neither is the HTML5 mode of http://validator.w3.org which is explicitly told to be “experimental”.)
(In reply to Jukka K. Korpela from comment #2) > Since it seems, from the history of similar bug reports through the years, > that the validator will not be modified to produce outline for HTML5 > documents, this feature should be disabled from its user interface, i.e. > when HTML5 validation is being performed, there should be no option for > requesting an outline. Or at least there should be statement in the report > saying that outline was not generated. All that would require somebody to actually make changes to the perl code of the legacy validator and the Web UI code for it. Nobody has even touched that code in a very long time. I guess I may have to myself eventually. > Now everything in the user interface makes the user think that outline works > for HTML5 but the outline is empty. This can be very confusing, and people > look for explanations in their own documents, not in the validator pages > (which probably don’t even mention this restriction). Yeah, I hear you. We should fix that at least. > Perhaps simpler, disable HTML5 mode entirely http://validator.w3.org and > point to http://validator.w3.org/nu/ for HTML5 validation. I have some ideas about how to do that and I hope to at least get those landed in the production validator within the next couple of months.
I added a warning message to the vnu backend to tell users of the legacy validator to use the current validator instead.