How to make a sitemap link in the page head pass the W3C validator?

html sitemap w3c-validation html-head
frequent picture frequent · Nov 11, 2012 · Viewed 18.9k times · Source

I'm trying to pass a page through the W3C Validator. The validation fails on the sitemap, which I'm including like this:

<link rel="sitemap" type="application/xml" title="Sitemap" href="../sitemap.xml" />

The error I'm getting is:

Bad value sitemap for attribute rel on element link: Not an absolute IRI. The string sitemap is not a registered keyword or absolute URL.

I have been trying forever to fix it, but nothing I'm trying seems to work plus this is the recommended layout by Google and Html5 Boilerplate.

Is there anything wrong with my syntax? Seems correct, but why is it not passing?

Answer

Quentin picture Quentin · Nov 11, 2012

The short answer is that you cannot.

HTML 5 defines the values that you are allowed to use in rel and sitemap is not one of the ones recognised by the validator.

The error message does say that you can register a new link type on a wiki, but sitemap is already there so you just have to wait for the validator developers to update the validator to reflect the new state of the wiki (assuming nobody deletes the entry).

(The basic problems here are that having the specification use a wiki page as a normative resource is nuts, that HTML 5 is still a draft, and that the HTML 5 validator is still considered experimental).

Related questions

HTML: How to get my subpages listed on a google search

When you go to Google and perform a search, it will return either one of two type of results: just the title of your webpage, or the title of your web-page plus, lists subpages it found on that web site …

Read More
How do I get PHP to echo XML tags?

I'm working on a site that has about 3,000-4,000 dynamically generated pages, and I'm looking to update the XML sitemap. I've tried using online generators in the past, and they never seem to capture all the pages correctly, so I …

Read More
What is the best way to generate a sitemap?

I need to build a sitemap for my website. The url will be "www.example.com/mysitemap.html". I know that there are some tools that generate automatically an XML file that contains the reachable URLs and also improve the …

Read More