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The "summary only" mode sends no output while processing all the links. Given how this phase can take up to minutes, some browsers consider it as a "server timeout". Issue already discussed in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qa-dev/2004Sep/0091.html but no obvious solution found yet.
Candidate fix in CVS: http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/perl/modules/W3C/LinkChecker/bin/checklink.diff?r1=4.7&r2=4.8&f=h As discussed in today's meeting, reassigning to Olivier for the "this may take some time" message in summary only mode (probably good to have for both cmdline and CGI).
Will take care of the "this may take some time" message, accepting assignment
"this may take some time" message added. A few tests revealed that although most browsers react well to the 'print spaces' hack, others don't. Notably, Mac OSX's safari doesn't even start rendering the page (and thus does not show the "this may take some time" message) before, apparently, having received "enough" content, and thus fails with a timeout error. Arguably, this is a browser bug, and there is little we can do about it beyond mentioning in the documentation that with some browsers, it is safer to not use the "summary only" option... Your thoughts?
Ok, let's just document it now and get 4.1 out, and keep eyes open for better implementations/workarounds in the future.
Comment 3 noted in the docs.