Fail build if there are dead internal links

[bjgill]

Using html-proofer. Will apply to new projects only - existing users of the template would need to apply this change manually.

Resolves #186

[bjgill]

Interesting. It turns out it catches other problems as well. The build's just about to fail. Which nicely proves that this linter does successfully fail the build if it detects problems 😝

- build/index.html
  *  image /images/gov.uk_logotype_crown_invert_trans.png does not have an alt attribute (line 42)
HTML-Proofer found 1 failure!

I don't really know enough about HTML to know if this is a serious problem, however.

I guess this is possibly a question for the maintainers of the template, who might have opinions. Here is the list of all the things that html-proofer checks. What do we actually want to check? I'm tempted to say everything - it's fairly simple for users to disable individual lints that do not make sense for them. It might be easiest to just check for dead links (i.e. disable everything else), and let users re-enable anything they think they need...

Images

img elements:

• Whether all your images have alt tags
• Whether your internal image references are not broken
• Whether external images are showing
• Whether your images are HTTP

Links

a, link elements:

• Whether your internal links are working
• Whether your internal hash references (#linkToMe) are working
• Whether external links are working
• Whether your links are HTTPS
• Whether CORS/SRI is enabled

Scripts

script elements:

• Whether your internal script references are working
• Whether external scripts are loading
• Whether CORS/SRI is enabled

Favicon

• Whether your favicons are valid.

OpenGraph

• Whether the images and URLs in the OpenGraph metadata are valid.

HTML

• Whether your HTML markup is valid. This is done via Nokogiri to ensure well-formed markup.

[bravegrape]

Thanks for raising this PR @bjgill 👍 We'll have a closer look at what exactly html-proofer checks for and see how to align that with the style guide and best practice.

[NickColley]

This feature looks really useful.

One thing to consider is if this feature be proposed on the tech-docs-gem? Then it could be distributed as part of that gem.

If there's no activity on this for a while we'll close this out, to tidy things up, so let us know if you want to continue working on this. 👍

[NickColley]

I think it would be good to keep trying this approach in a few more of the important tech docs instances, for example the GaaP projects.

Then, when we're confident it works across different scenarios we could consider adding this to the gem itself?

[jonathanglassman]

I think it would be good to keep trying this approach in a few more of the important tech docs instances, for example the GaaP projects.

Then, when we're confident it works across different scenarios we could consider adding this to the gem itself?

Seems sensible.

[bravegrape]

I think it would be good to keep trying this approach in a few more of the important tech docs instances, for example the GaaP projects.

Then, when we're confident it works across different scenarios we could consider adding this to the gem itself?

Yup, sounds sensible, but worth mentioning that some docs, like the PaaS docs have implemented link checking in other ways.

Might be one to try for the Pay docs @m-green ?

[m-green]

Definitely @bravegrape - was literally just trying this out locally on Pay docs after seeing this PR :)

[lfdebrux]

Closing this until we're ready to pick up #186 again.