In a dream, I was a web application developer.  Okay, so it’s not really a dream but sort of a renewed hobby of mine.  Many years ago I was interested in developing web content before the days of dynamic content, but some free time at work and some interest in creating some useful apps in PHP to help me out at work have spurred a new drive to learn.

PHP isn’t something I’m a master at by any shot, but I know enough to be dangerous.  In addition, I’ve taken to learning jQuery so I can add some neat features to my app.

However, I’ve found an interesting effect of using XHTML tags with jQuery… apparently it doesn’t like it.  In a few places I’ve got some append() functions to stick text into several <DIV> sections with various IDs and strangely they hadn’t been working.  I thought there was something I was missing (apparently so!) and tried various other code examples and variants in trying to make it work.  Then I had an idea.

Instead of closing my DIV tags with <DIV /> I changed it to </DIV>.  The result?  My appends were working correctly.  I’ll have to do some Googling to find out what the reason for this is, but it certainly had my hands tied for a while.  I can only hope some other novice doesn’t get snagged on this like I did…