javascript - Why do I need to comment the <script> tag in HTML?

Question

Most examples I've seen have scripts in a html page being enclosed by

<!--
...
-->

I've tried writing it without the comment tags and there doesn't seem to be any difference. Why is the comment tag used and what function does it serve?

Answer 1

It's not really necessary any more. This has only ever served as a backwards-compatibility hack of sorts - when scripts first started being inserted into static HTML pages, most browsers couldn't support them. Without the comments, they would ignore the semantics of the <script> tag (which they didn't understand), and then would emit the script source onto the page.

Ironically, the solution was a hack in itself - AFAIK, no part of the HTML spec says that script tags should be parsed when inside of comments. The fact that all browsers picked this up seems to be more of a coincidence than anything else. Certainly with XHTML, comments are comments so a fully conformant browser would have to ignore your scripts.

So basically, unless you want to support really, really old browsers (at the cost of breaking some new ones) it's no longer necessary to do this.