I have an external javascript file that I want to, upon include, write some HTML to the end of the web page.

Upon doing so though I get the error Missing } in XML expression on the line that uses dropdownhtml.

Here is my code

var dropdownhtml = '<div id="dropdown"></div>';

$(document).ready(function(){

    //$(document).append(dropdownhtml);
    alert(dropdownhtml);
});

The XHTML webpage that includes this file does so like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/web/resources/js/dropdownmenu.js"></script>

Doing either append or alert throws up the same error, what is going wrong?