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JavaScript Script Tags Violate Normal Tag Rules
03/08/12
JavaScript Script Tags Violate Normal Tag Rules
You know how you can - for just about every HTML tag - combine the start and end tags, XML-style, into just one node?
For example, you need not go <img src="mypig.jpg"></img> - you can simply go <img src="mypig.jpg"/>.
It turns out that this is not the case for <script> tags at all, at least not without special treatment.
I had a fairly simple page to which I was trying to add a JavaScript include, a snippet of which went like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="../js/dialogs.js" />
<script type="text/javascript">
function initPage() {
.. rest of function ..
Then, later on in the page, I tell the body to run initPage when it loads:
<body onload="initPage()" ...
When I showed the web page, I got the error:
SCRIPT5007: The value of the property 'initPage' is null or undefined, not a Function object
How could that possibly be?
As it turned out, that JavaScript inclusion did not seem to consider the script block finished... or something. Everything worked again when I changed that line to this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="../js/dialogs.js" ></script>
Now there's a twist. Apparently, this is the case when the web page gets sent back with the 'normal' HTTP header Content-Type: text/html. If it is sent back with application/xhtml+xml instead, then the start and end script tags no longer have to be broken up. See here.
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