Validating Stylesheets Within IE Conditional Comments

Conditional comments are a special HTML comment syntax that will be ignored by all browsers except IE.

Such comments are commonly used to serve additional stylesheets to specific versions of IE:

<!--[if IE 8]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/ie-8-specific-overrides.css">
<![endif]-->

To be ignored is the only purpose of a comment. Unless, however, you’re dealing with IE conditional comments, in which case the contents of a comment will pretend to be HTML under the correct conditions.

Should we ignore all comments even though they might refer to resources that require CSS validation?

This is something I decided I needed to look into.

CSS Validator Improvements Overview

Today I finished deploying to production some excellent CSS validation improvements:

• updated to the latest W3C CSS validator
• validation of stylesheets in IE conditional comments
• improved CSS validation robustness

JavaScript Static Analysis Analysis

I’m in the process of removing the JavaScript static analysis feature.

I’m really quite sure that the results of such tests are of no value and that almost no-one uses this feature.

Does (relatively) anyone use this feature? Let’s flex our SQL fingers and see whether my assumptions match reality.

Bye Bye JavaScript Static Analysis

About six years ago I added the option for single-page and full-site JavaScript static analysis via JSLint.

This change seemed a good idea at the time. It may well have been a good idea at the time.

Times have changed and the world has moved on. Whether or not the ability to run all the JavaScript across your site through JSLint was good idea six years ago, it is now quite clear that it is no longer of any benefit.

In short, I’ll soon start to remove the JavaScript static analysis feature that Simply Testable provides.