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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T07:40:00+00:00

Okay – this is the dumbest glitch I have seen in a while: <!DOCTYPE

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Okay – this is the dumbest glitch I have seen in a while:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<script type='text/javascript'>

var data = "</script>";

</script>
</head>
<body>

This should break!

</body>
</html>

This causes syntax errors because the JavaScript parser is actually reading the contents of the string. How stupid!

How can I put </script> in my code. Is there any way?

Is there a valid reason for this behavior?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Within X(HT)ML (when actually treated as such), scripts are required to be escaped as CDATA for precisely this reason. http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/diffs.html#h-4.8

    In XHTML, the script and style elements are declared as having #PCDATA content. As a result, < and & will be treated as the start of markup, and entities such as &lt; and &amp; will be recognized as entity references by the XML processor to < and & respectively. Wrapping the content of the script or style element within a CDATA marked section avoids the expansion of these entities.

    <script type="text/javascript">
<![CDATA[
  ... unescaped script content ...
]]>
</script>

    If your XHTML document is just served as text/html and treated as tag soup, that doesn’t apply and you’ll just have to “escape” the string like '</scr' + 'ipt>'.

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