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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T09:16:45+00:00

The w3c validator service complains that the following html is invalid. It does not

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The w3c validator service complains that the following html is invalid. It does not like the ampersand(&) in my javascript. But ampersands are allowed in javascript strings, aren’t they?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <title>Page Title</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <script type="text/javascript">


           function search(query) {
             redir = "http://search.mysite.com/search?s=FIN&ref=&q=" + query;
             window.location.href = redir
             return false;
            }
        </script>

        <span>This is all valid HTML</span>

    </body>
</html>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    No, it is indeed not valid. If you want to use in-line JavaScript in an XHTML file, you’ll need to wrap the JavaScript in CDATA. If you don’t want to do that, then you’re stuck with encoding &, < and >, which in JavaScript can be quite a pain.

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