October 1, 1999 - Hiding the Script

Yehuda Shiran October 1, 1999
Hiding the Script
Tips: October 1999

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
Doc JavaScript

Some old browsers do not support JavaScript. These browsers will ignore the <SCRIPT> and </SCRIPT> tags but will fail to interpret everything in between. To avoid this browsing error, comment out the script body by wrapping it in an HTML comment, <!-- and -->. Now we have a new difficulty: how does the JavaScript interpreter handle the HTML comment tags? Luckily enough, it was designed to ignore the opening comment tag, <!--. However, it does not ignore the closing tag so we must insert a one-line JavaScript comment operator:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
// -->
</SCRIPT>