Loading Scripts in Javascript

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Why don't self-closing script tags work?

Why is it that

and

are different

The latter form doesn't seem to load and if I replace it with the first way it does work correctly.

Check out the answers to [this question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/69913/why-dont-self-closing-script-tags-work) that has 96+ votes. — DOK, Mar 18 '11 at 17:51
apologies, i didn't realise this was a duplicate. I voted to close it. — Gordon Thompson, Mar 18 '11 at 17:55

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 18 '11 at 17:50

In XML <foo></foo> and <foo/> mean exactly the same thing. So in an XHTML document (if it is interpreted as XML), there is no difference between them.

In SGML, they do not.

HTML was, historically, designed as an SGML application (and predates XML). Browsers have implemented their parsers with this in mind (although they are not complete SGML parsers and some valid syntax is incorrectly handled).

When you serve a document to a browser with a text/html Content-Type, it interprets it as HTML.

Thus <script/> is treated as a start tag for an element where the end tag is required.

When writing HTML compatible XHTML (i.e. XHTML that is served as text/html) the guidelines recommend that elements which are defined as EMPTY (and thus the end tag is forbidden) be expressed as <foo/> and all other elements be expressed as <foo></foo>.

Since the <script> element can have content (an inline script), the end tag is not forbidden, so the explicit end tag is needed.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 18 '11 at 17:49

0

Probably because is not a single thingy tag (I forgot what they are called) like BR or HR. Script tags always need to be opened and closed.

answered Mar 18 '11 at 17:49

JohnP

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Loading Scripts in Javascript

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