[jQuery] re-establish user selection in a div with designmode=true

I have a web app where I have created a div to masquerade at a textarea so I can add highlighting according to so rules. I rely on setting designmode=true. After certain amounts of idle time my code grabs the text from the div, which consists of p tags and span tags and re-generates the html with

[jQuery] inline script html vs xhtml

I am a bit perplexed at why a simple bit of code I have is firing in HTML but not in the equivalent XHTML. Here is the HTML file (that works as expected): html head titleText Demo/title meta http-equiv=Content-type content=text/html;charset=UTF-8 link rel=stylesheet type=text/css