Lint tool should report broken links and documentation should reflect this

[TalbotG]

http://web-platform-tests.org/writing-tests/lint-tool.html
does not indicate that the lint tool will report broken links. I strongly
believe lint tool should report broken links and the documentation
should be updated to indicate this, to make this explicit.

[foolip]

@TalbotG, do you mean a definition of broken that's similar to https://validator.w3.org/checklink, or what kinds of problems do you want to catch?

[TalbotG]

Philip,

I meant a broken link to an image <img src="..."> or to a script <script src="..."> or to replaced content. https://validator.w3.org/checklink will check linkage to image and script btw. So, yes, a definition of broken that's similar to https://validator.w3.org/checklink ; an unfetchable resource , 404 .

This #10017 issue is a followup-to a comment made by D. Baron in issue #9912. Apparently, and if I understand all this correctly, the lint tool will report broken links in the tests submitted into web-platform-tests repository but not in tests to-be-created by the build system to create a test suite.

In the Lint tool documentation, section Fixing lint errors
http://web-platform-tests.org/writing-tests/lint-tool.html#fixing-lint-errors
there is no mention of reporting broken links (to image or to script).

[gsnedders]

In general, we don't check links exist (primarily because this is relatively expensive, and impossible in general, and we care somewhat about the performance of the lint); it's relied on reviewers to catch it (and likely vendors noticing that the link is broken if it fails as a result).

That said, we do check that support files in css/ are within a support directory (though obviously there's plenty of paths that are accepted by the lint to such files that break with the build system, such as ../support/foo.png), and this is what was caught by the lint in #9912.