Description

Using JavaScript becomes much more powerful when common functionality can be shared across a web site rather than embedding code in at page level over and over again. To do this, all you need to do is create your JavaScript in a standalone file, save it with the .js extension and then refer to it within the script element using the src attribute. The same rules regarding locating the resource apply as per other external resources (images, links to other pages), whereby "../" in the src indicates to the request the file from a directory one level up from the current directory (that the referring page resides in), and "/" indicates that the browser should start looking in the domain document root.

If the src attribute contains a valid URI, the browser should then ignore any content inside the opening <script> and closing </script> tags, for example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/complex.js">
//the next line should be ignored if /scripts/complex.js exists
alert("Well howdi ho, pardners!");
</script>

When presented with the above, the annoying alert should not be displayed to the user, only the contents of complex.js should be processed (and thankfully, all the browsers tested honored this).