Navarr's Tech Side The Technical Side of my Life

Making Google Analytics Work in XHTML

I was moving my website, Google Voice for Outlook, over from HTML5 to XHTML5 today, and as soon as I did the basic content negotiation filters in PHP so that it would send the appropriate headers if the client supported XHTML as well as only outputting the <?xml if the client supported XHTML, I checked my developer tools to find a JavaScript error.  It was Google Analytics, of course.  document.write doesn’t exist in XHTML, after all.

The fix was simple, replace the current four line inclusion code with:

Code block
   
<script type="text/javascript">
	var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
	var script = document.createElement("script");
	script.src = gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js";
	script.type = "text/javascript";
	document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(script);
</script>

This will work fine, unless of course you have no head tag.  In which case you should replace getElementsByTagName(“head”) with getElementsByTagName(“html”).