[thelist] Javascript/HTML Validation

[Andrew Clover]

Kevin Switzer <Kevin.Switzer at Stamats.com> wrote:

> The way you said didn't quite work, because it saw the </sty and thought
> there was an open tag for <sty>  , so I changed the closing tag to
> <'+'/'+'style> and it worked great!  

That's correct. The troublesome sequence is "</" ('ETAGO'). This is used 
in SGML-based HTML to end an element that contains CDATA, such as 
<script> and <style>. In common practice, browsers ignore ETAGOs that 
aren't part of the close-tag for the current element, but validators are 
more strict.

The canonical JS hack is to use a backslash string-literal escape:

   document.write('<\/script>');

Of course things are different in XML, and all the more confusing if 
you're writing XHTML as you have to obey the rules of both...

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/