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Published
20 hours ago •
lycheeverse
lycheeverse
How should lychee treat empty-string `href` values?
Context
If I'm writing markdown
[this website]()
that gets compiled to html
<a href="">this website</a>
the href's value is the page's address. However, an empty href is also a red flag: the author probably didn't mean to leave those links empty. lychee currently interprets each empty link as a check if the current document can be reached, which it always can be.
Reproduction
mkdir -p /tmp/empty_href
echo "[this website]()" > /tmp/empty_href/example.md
echo '<html><body><a href="">this website</a></body></html>' > /tmp/empty_href/example.html
lychee -vv /tmp/empty_href/
Desired behavior
An empty_link = "warn" # or "ok" or "error" configuration option would preserve the current technically-correct link-checking behavior while giving users information about suspicious links and a way to opt into more rigorous checking.
