problem with document.location and w3c

holdmykidney · April 1st, 2005, 05:34 AM

Hello

I have a problem with an XHTML page, with regards to validation according to w3c.

The problem is that my javascript function tries to call:

document.location = "?process=1&sort=name&latest=true"

Which works fine, but according to w3c, the ampersand characters need to be encoded as & i.e.:

document.location = "?process=1&sort=name&latest=true"

However, this doesn't work, since the browser does not unencode html entities in a javascript block!

arg! Apart from sticking the javascript file in a separate .js file so that w3c don't validate the contents, how can I get around this?

holdmykidney

joefawcett · April 1st, 2005, 05:54 AM

As far as I know they don't need to be encoded in script blocks, only in href and src attributes.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

nzakas · May 3rd, 2005, 07:41 PM

Joe is right, you don't need to escape your strings in JavaScript. If you are going for 100% valid XHTML, you should put your JavaScript code into an external JavaScript file and remove the encoding. The other option, depending on what browsers you're targeting, is to surround your JavaScript code with a CDATA section, such as:

Code:

<script type="text/javascript"><![CDATA[
    //your javascript code here
]]></script>

Be aware that this will cause an error in any browser that doesn't fully support XHTML (like IE).

Nicholas C. Zakas
Author, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (ISBN 0764579088)
http://www.nczonline.net/