CDATA in Firefox and IE

Question

Hi,
I have this problem with browser interoperability. I have a script for a video player that uses Spry to read from an XML file. The problem I have is that everything works as it should in IE but Firefox fails to run the method bcause of the CDATA stuff in the <description> tag of the XML file.
This is an element of my XML:
<playlist_item id="25">
     <title>Blah Blah Blah</title>
     <description>
          <![CDATA[<p>blah blah<ul><li><a href="">Link 1</a></li><li><a href="">Link 2</a></li><li><a href="">Link 3</a></li></ul></p>]]>
     </description>
     <image>blah.png</image>
     <video>/blah.flv</video>
     <duration>01:26</duration>
     <date>11/12/2009</date>
</playlist_item>
The onClick event doesn't fire in Firefox if the description is CDATA.
<a spry:hover="selectHover" href="#" onclick="displayDescription('{title}','{description}');return false;"><img src="{image}" width="102" height="67"></img></a>
Any ideas on how to do this?

Answer 1

the onclick="" also uses double quotes, and the content you are injecting in to the function as string also contains quotes. This might be causing the issue.
If this is the case you create a custom function::<function name> that escapes the value for you. For example:
function escape_description(region search ){
     return escape( seach("{description}"));
<a spry:hover="selectHover" href="#" onclick="displayDescription('{title}','{function::escape_description}');return false;"><img src="{image}" width="102" height="67"></img></a>
and in your displayDescription function you can just unescape the string.
function displayDescription( title, description ){
     alert( unescape(description));
For debugging firefox i would recommend installing the following addong : http://www.getfirebug.com/ It shows if you page has errors much better. And contains handy tools to speed up the debugging process.