Shortcoming of the broken link detector

[ivyreese]

Some of the changes in #17 should have been caught, but weren't. Perhaps the broken link checker doesn't play well with ../ relative links?

[msakrejda]

I might take a look at this at some point. Where is the broken link detector? A search only brings up this issue.

[ivyreese]

It's here:

automerge.github.io/system/validation.ts

Line 29 in 39928de

const checkLink = (pages: Page[], page: Page, link: string) => {

[msakrejda]

Okay, so I'm pretty sure skipping links with dots is the culprit: one of the links that escaped detection was https://automerge.org/automerge-repo/classes/_automerge_automerge_repo_network_websocket.BrowserWebSocketClientAdapter.html, and that has dots in both the domain name and the path. We could special-case a check for the former pretty easily without having to support checking external links, but I'm not sure what to do about the latter.

What's the reason for not supporting links with dots? The comment doesn't explain and I didn't notice anything when reading through the function and its dependencies.

[ivyreese]

Thanks for taking a look!

Okay, so I'm pretty sure skipping links with dots is the culprit

Yep, that makes sense.

What's the reason for not supporting links with dots?

The link checking code is focused on internal links between pages on the site. I'd wanted to check external links as well, but this has some complexity to it, so I ruled this out of scope when I initially wrote this code. I added the "skip links with dots" as a quick and dirty way to skip all external links, at the cost of false negatives (skipping legitimately broken internal links).

It'd probably be fairly straightforward to replace that "skip links with dots" code with something smarter that only skips external links. I if we did that, the following might "just work":

• support for ../
• support for asset files etc (".css")
• support for static html pages

I say might because I only just gave this function a quick glance and it seems plausible. Feel free to give it a crack, or leave it for me the next time I do a round on this site.

[msakrejda]

I took a stab at that in #31, but it flags a bunch of stuff that does work on the live site (so presumably it's generated and included elsewhere; this appears to be mostly reference docs).