Forcing TAL to render mismatched tags

Today I installed Google website optimizer for a Plone site. This tool requires the use of a </noscript> tag in order to designate the end of a block that may be used in experiments. Unfortunately, if you try to insert this in a Zope page template you’ll see something like this:

Compilation failed
zope.tal.htmltalparser.NestingError: No tags are open to match </noscript>, at line 2, column 1

You can work around this using the following idiom:

<tal:block tal:content="structure string:&lt;/noscript&gt;"/>

This bypasses TAL compilation by parsing the </noscript> as a string, then inserts it into the template as HTML structure. The angle brackets are written as HTML entities so that the template has a chance of passing XML validation.

Credit to Darryl Dixon via #plone on IRC, and my colleague Jon Baldivieso for the HTML entities suggestion. Thanks!

3 Responses to “Forcing TAL to render mismatched tags”

  1. I actually really like this approach and would try this way. I like seeing the ‘forceinvalid’ so you know exactly what is being accomplished on the line.

    <tal:forceinvalid content=”structure string:</noscript>”/>

    Adam said this on November 12th, 2008 at 7:31 am

  2. Awesome! Thanks for this.

    Eric Steele said this on November 12th, 2008 at 8:30 am

  3. very cool and interesting.

    Rob Porter said this on November 14th, 2008 at 8:13 am

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