JS won't work unless empty script tags present

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Views: 712 | Replies: 2 | Solved

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Join Date: Jul 2008

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Newbie Poster

JS won't work unless empty script tags present

Jul 3rd, 2008

This is the weirdest problem I've seen so far. But upfront this is my first javascript development. I've mostly programmed in Actionscript and PHP.

I have quite a bit of javascript running on my PHP page. I had just gotten everything to work well (looking at you IE7!) and I moved one function to another place because out of the blue I was getting "function is not defined."

From there everything went wrong. Soon the page wouldn't register any functions. I moved it all to an external .js file and that solved nothing.

So I went back to where it all went wrong. One by one as I used the page I would get an undefined function error. So I moved these one by one to a different part of the page. Soon I was able to get all the code working but I had my leftover <script> tags.

Help with Code Tags

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<link href="css/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jsTrace-uc.js"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/dom-drag.js"/>
<script type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  function listHide(boxid){
    document.getElementById(boxid).style.visibility = "hidden";
    document.getElementById(boxid).style.display = "none";
  }
...

So I deleted this and lo and behold, the page stopped working completely again. So I put it back in and it worked!

As I said I haven't done any real Javascript before so I don't really know the nuances of the page structure concerning the scripting environment. But this seems like a very very odd issue.

But it's one of those "how the hell did I ever figure that out."

In case someone is bored and wants to figure this out I've attached the code. I wouldn't mind knowing (for future reference) why in the world this is happening.

Attached Files

build.txt (8.2 KB, 0 views)

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Join Date: Apr 2005

Location: New York state

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Code Monkey

Re: JS won't work unless empty script tags present

Jul 3rd, 2008

It doesn't work because script tags can never be short-tags i.e., <tagname />, they must be explicitly closed i.e., <tagname></tagname>

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Join Date: Jul 2008

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Re: JS won't work unless empty script tags present

Jul 3rd, 2008

Thanks! I was just thinking about that this morning. I've been looking at the JS for the problem I just looked it right over.

But those tags have been like that since I put them in and only in the past two days did I get the 'function is not defined' error.

But thanks again. I knew it was something stupidly simple.