What does Firebug "XML cannot be the whole program" error message mean?

Question

I just got this error message in Firebug. A google search reveals nothing but other mystified people! Does anyone have any idea what it means?

It's being indicated on the last line of this 3-line script:

<script>
    g_BuildServer = "/";
</script>

Answer 1

If you put JavaScript in a js file (which I assume you did), do NOT put the script tags, put

g_BuildServer = "/";

only.

Otherwise, to the parser, you just provided an XML document as a script.

Answer 2

Happened to me too, just for having an empty script tag in the page. When I removed this:

<script src="" type="text/javascript"></script>

everything got back to normal..

Answer 3

I got the "XML cannot be the whole program" error because the server was returning an xml error message in response to a request for a javascript file. My case may be unusual, but here it is:

I had a servlet filter granting or denying access to server resources. If it grants access, you get the resource, otherwise, you get <filterResponse><Access_Denied/></filterResponse>. I had failed to add the javascript file to the list of resources you don't have to be logged in to access. So, when Firefox received an XML error message as the body of a javascript program, its complaint makes perfect sense.

Answer 4

I got this error when using jquery $get with no data type attribute when it was retrieving html. I added the dataType parameter as "html" and it fixed the issue.

Answer 5

I experienced this error when I had a comment in my javascript but it didn't start with a /* it just had a few *'s hence creating a syntax error

Answer 6

Also you can get this error while you use jQuery. In that case replace "$" with "jQuery"

Answer 7

It also happens, when you use jQuery's template plugin, and you place the markup in a script tag, but you forget to change the script tag's type attribute to 'text/x-jquery-tmpl'