On this page: Main Content. What's Wrong?. Other Reports?. Reported?. Status?. Links. Test links.
December 2016. The old W3C MobileOK Checker has been taken off line. It was still available until recently but wrongly claimed that virtually all HTTPS sites had invalid certificates. Evidently the W3C decided it not worth fixing. This page is here only as a record of some of its difficulties.
For most linked to HTTPS sites the checker wrongly reported that
Testing this page on the old mobileOK checker reported the 'certificate is invalid' error for eight or nine of twelve formerly live HTTPS links below. (w3 2016b). It also usually reported that 'the certificate does not match the requested URI' for at least one of them. But which ones? It was different every time you ran the test. There didn't seem to be any predictable pattern.
Others had noticed that there was an issue (Al-Anon 2015; Venerated 2015). (The referenced Al-Anon page had a footnote remarking that the W3C mobileOK Checker might only give a 65% grade because of 'invalid certificates of ncwsa.org links'.)
I was able to report this to the machine secretary, but it wasn't delivering any messages to humans. I then tried to report it to the secretary's supervising machine, but it wouldn't take my report because it wouldn't trust humans. I did NOT make this up:
As noted, the old mobileOK checker has finally been taken offline.
Dec. 2016. This was a set of 12 live HTTPS links to various sites as a test, so that when the old mobileOK checker was run on this page, up cropped the wildly unpredictable HTTPS errors.
The checker reported errors on the 12 HTTPS links below. They all opened fine locally, even in the Kindle paperwhite's appallingly limited browser. And the certificate details appeared to be in perfect order. The errors were quite unpredictable.
It would have been nice if there was someone home at the W3C to deal with this and simply shut off the certificate warnings. But their choice was to shut off the validator entirely. Here are the test https links, but they're no longer live: