There are two reasons why XHTML has a problem with Google's AdSense code:
- It uses the javascript function Document.Write(), which XHTML can't handle because it would output new markup whilst the document is still being parsed.
- It creates an <iframe> element, which cannot be used with strict varieties of XHTML.
It's inconvenient, but fortunately not impossible to deal with. The solution is basically to render the ads as plain old text/html inside an object element. This does mean that you need to put your AdSense code into a separate file, referenced by the object element. An example using PHP...
Given the original AdSense script code:
<script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-8595518574874016"; /* Homepage, vertical, wide */ google_ad_slot = "5511616855"; google_ad_width = 160; google_ad_height = 600; //--> </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script>
We replace that with:
<object width="160" height="600" data="/includes/adsense.php" type="text/html"> </object>
And create the file /includes/adsense.php as:
<?php header("Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8"); ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>Sponsorship</title> <style type="text/css"> body {margin: 0px; padding: 0px;} </style> </head> <body> <script type="text/javascript"> google_ad_client = "pub-8595518574874016"; google_ad_slot = "5511616855"; google_ad_width = 160; google_ad_height = 600; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script> </body> </html>
Obviously, you have to substitute your own google_ad variables. I found this solution as an example somewhere, but I lost the link, so apologies for neglecting to give credit.
