IE script tag problem

October 18th, 2005. Tagged: (x)HTML(5)

Issue:
The page not displayed in IE. "View Source" shows the full source, <title> is displayed OK, but the page is not blank. White screen of death. Nothing.

Cause:

<script type="text/javascript" src="some.js" />

Solution:

<script type="text/javascript" src="some.js"></script>

Comments:
It's probably this whole thing with the current support of XHTML. Most browsers (in their forgiveness for HTML authoring errors) interpret XHTML as HTML with some weirdly placed slashes and other noise. So for example they see <br /> as a slightly broken <br>. More about this here.
In the case above probably IE needs the end </script> tag and because it cannot find it, it treats the whole HTML document as JavaScript, apparently broken. Hence the white page with OK source and OK HTML title.

... And while on the script tag subject, "language" is not a valid XHTML Strict attribute for <script>.

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