All you need to do to use jQuery with PHP is to include the jQuery javascript file in your HTML document in the head tag. I actually use PHP along with jQuery all the time. And this is how I do it. In your code above, it looks like you have some escaping issues with your code. And it also looks like you want to hold the header of the page in a PHP variable then print it out. You don’t have to do all that. Just put the plain text in your PHP file without any php tags and it will work. Also, you are using an old version of jQuery. Should probably use the latest version. But, if you need it stored in a PHP variable so that you can print it out, do this:
SO, here is some code to get you started.
<?php
$pageStart = '<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>MY WEBSITE PAGE</title>
<link href="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.17/themes/base/jquery-ui.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.17/jquery-ui.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(e) {
$("#date").datepicker();
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<input type="text" id="date" name="date" />
</body>
</html>';
print $pageStart;
?>