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[ ]]>