Gurus,
I am self taught. There's a lot of what you enlightened ones call basic I know nothing about.
Reading this jQuery Tutorial, I noticed this tag (for lack of better word): "CDATA" as shown here (third line from the top):
<script src="http://jquery.com/src/jquery-latest.js"></script>
<script>
//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function(){
$(".article .thebody").hide();
$("#container .article ul")
.prepend("<li class='readbody'><a href='' title='Read the article'>Read Body</a></li>");
$(".actions li.readbody a").click(function(event){
$(this).parents("ul").prev(".thebody").toggle();
event.preventDefault();
});
});
//]]></script>
What is the meaning of CDATA? Are there tags similar to CDATA?
Answer
With <![CDATA[ you can embed JS in XML (and XHTML) documents without the need to replace special XML characters like <, >, &, etc by XML entities <, >, & etc to prevent that the XML syntax get malformed and that you get errors like The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference. The general recommendation is however to put JS code in its own .js file which you then include by a <script src>.
The <![CDATA[ is not needed in plain HTML documents. Unless you're developing with a XML based view technology like Facelets (for JSF) or ASP.NET MVC, there's absolutely no need to declare your HTML as XHTML. Just a <!DOCTYPE html> would suffice