Question

My script function is defined inside a JSF2 form on a XHTML page and the following part of the code causes a problem:

<script type="text/javascript">
  function myFunction(){
   var checkboxes = document.getElementsByName('mycheckboxes');
   if(checkboxes.length > 0){
     for (var i=0; i<checkboxes.length; i++){
      var checkbox = checkboxes[i];
     }
    }
  }
</script>

When trying to access the page in FireFox 8 it prints the exception:

Element type “checkboxes.length” must be followed by either attribute specifications, “>” or “/>”

what does this error mean?

Another question: is the script is executed before the pages is rendered? Because my checkboxes is loaded in the page during render phase of page (using JSF <ui:repeat>), so my guess is that I must make a condition to execute the code when the variable checkboxes is not null, am I right?

Answer 1

It looks like you are using XHTML and embedding scripts in the page.

XML doesn’t have intrinsic CDATA sections, so < means “start of tag” even inside a script element.

If you were using real XHTML then you could represent it as <, but then you couldn’t serve the document as text/html.

Instead you can wrap the script content with an explicit CDATA section as described in the specification while also taking care to follow the relevant text/html compatibility guidelines.

You would probably be better off keeping your script in an external file and loading it with <script src="..."></script>.

For that matter, you are likely to be better off using HTML instead of writing XHTML and then jumping through hoops to make it work in browsers that expect HTML.