Error parsing XHTML: The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup
Facelets is a XML based view technology which uses XHTML+XML to generate HTML output. XML has five special characters which has special treatment by the XML parser:
<
the start of a tag.>
the end of a tag."
the start and end of an attribute value.'
the alternative start and end of an attribute value.&
the start of an entity (which ends with;
).
In case of <
, the XML parser is implicitly looking for the tag name and the end tag >
. However, in your particular case, you were using <
as a JavaScript operator, not as an XML entity. This totally explains the XML parsing error you got:
The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup.
In essence, you're writing JavaScript code in the wrong place, a XML document instead of a JS file, so you should be escaping all XML special characters accordingly. The <
must be escaped as <
.
So, essentially, the
for (var i = 0; i < length; i++) {
must become
for (var i = 0; i < length; i++) {
to make it XML-valid.
However, this makes the JavaScript code harder to read and maintain. As stated in Mozilla Developer Network's excellent document Writing JavaScript for XHTML, you should be placing the JavaScript code in a character data (CDATA) block. Thus, in JSF terms, that would be:
<h:outputScript>
<![CDATA[
// ...
]]>
</h:outputScript>
The XML parser will interpret the block's contents as "plain vanilla" character data and not as XML and hence interpret the XML special characters "as-is".
But, much better is to just put the JS code in its own JS file which you include by <script src>
, or in JSF terms, the <h:outputScript>
.
<h:outputScript name="functions.js" target="head" />
This way you don't need to worry about XML-special characters in your JS code. Additional advantage is that this gives the browser the opportunity to cache the JS file so that average response size is smaller.
See also:
- The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference
- Is it possible to use JSF+Facelets with HTML 4/5?
- How to reference CSS / JS / image resource in Facelets template?
- Writing JavaScript for XHTML
I ran across this post today as I was running into the same issue and had the same problem of the javascript not running with the CDATA tags listed above. I corrected the CDATA tags to look like:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
your javascript code here
//]]>
</script>
Then everything worked perfectly!
Sometimes you will need this :
/*<![CDATA[*/
/*]]>*/
and not only this :
<![CDATA[
]]>