HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
// -->
</script>
For browsers that ignore the
<script>
tag, the contents are masked
by the comment delimiters
<!--
and
-->
. JavaScript-enabled browsers,
on the other hand, automatically recognize and interpret the JavaScript
statements delimited by the comment tags. By using this skeleton for
all your
<script>
tags, you can be sure that all browsers handle your
document gracefully, if not completely.
Unfortunately, as we discuss in
Chapter 16
,
script content for XHTML
documents must be within a special CDATA declaration, rather than
within comments. Hence, HTML browsers won't honor XHTML scripts,
and vice versa. Our only recommendation at this point is to follow the
popular browsers: write in HTML, but use as many of the features of
XHTML as you can in preparation for the future.
You may include more than one
<script>
tag in a document, located
in either the
<head>
or the
<body>
. The JavaScript-enabled browser ex-
ecutes the statements in order. Variables and functions defined within
one
<script>
tag may be referenced by JavaScript statements in other
<script>
tags. In fact, one common JavaScript programming style is
to use a single
<script>
in the document
<head>
to define common
functions and global variables for the document and then to call those
functions and reference their variables in other JavaScript statements
sprinkled throughout the document.
