[R-pkg-devel] HTML5 errors in win-builder R-release check

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 03/05/2022 1:54 p.m., J C Nash wrote:
> I've been asked to "fix" some NOTEs in two of my packages.
> 
> The local (Linux Mint) R CMD check --as-cran gives no errors. Nor does win-builder for R-devel,
> but R-release gives many errors of the form
> 
> Found the following problems:
> Rcgmin.Rd:17:1: Warning: <table> attribute "width" not allowed for HTML5
> 
> Rcgmin.Rd:46:1: Warning: <tr> attribute "valign" not allowed for HTML5
> 
> Rcgmin.Rd:50:1: Warning: <tr> attribute "valign" not allowed for HTML5
> 
> Rcgmin.Rd:56:1: Warning: <tr> attribute "valign" not allowed for HTML5
> 
> 
> In some cases the lines pointed to are beyond the end of my Rd file.
> 
> Does anyone know the source, and hopefully the solution, to these?
> 
> It's really difficult to fix something that does not appear to be an error
> in the systems I can dig into.

This has been discussed on R-sig-mac.

The messages likely originate in the "tidy" utility.  Some systems have 
very old versions of tidy which complain about very valid things; others 
have very new versions which spot errors in the HTML generation that R 
uses when building HTML help pages.

I think the error locations are misleading, in that "Rcgmin.Rd:17:1" 
really should be "Rcgmin.html:17:1", i.e. column 1 of line 17 of the 
html version of the Rcgmin help page (and I'd guess the column number is 
wrong too).

There may be a few real errors mixed in with the spurious ones, but I 
think I'd ignore all such warnings for now, since there's nothing you 
can do about most of them.

Duncan Murdoch