XHTML validation with JavaScript

The W3C XHTML validator will complain if you’ve got JavaScript embedded in your XHTML markup and you haven’t taken steps to make it XHTML friendly.

Either move the JavaScript into a file (in this example called script.js):

<script src="script.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Or add CDATA tags around the JavaScript that’s embedded in the markup:

<script type="text/javascript">
<![CDATA[
... unescaped script content ...
]]>
</script>

References

• Writing HTML in a SCRIPT Element, from Common HTML Validation Problems by the Web Design Group.
• 4.8. Script and Style elements section of the XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition) W3C spec.

Last modified: 08/05/2006 (most likely earlier as a site migration in 2006 reset some dates) Tags: (none)