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Hi, The w3c online validator seems to have some issues with SSL in some cases, and fails to visit an address. It might be SSL version or cipher related, I'm not sure about that, but here is my example: https://florianbador.com/ I could not find any tool, bot or browser that fails to connect. However, w3c cannot connect. On my server, I get this log when w3c is making an attempt: SSL connect accept failed because of handshake problems error:14094412:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert bad certificate I'm very interested if you can understand this problem, because maybe w3c is not the only program that has this issue on my servers. Thanks!
Ok I found out the exact problem. The bot requires a chain in the SSL certificate. Without chain it would consider the certificate invalid and fail. I think W3C should not require a chain because most browsers don't, only Android and some old Internet Explorer fail without chain.
We recommend just using the current W3C HTML Checker https://validator.w3.org/nu/