Where Does JavaScript Go and Why?

Because we will create the programming logic for the Canvas in JavaScript, a question arises: where does that JavaScript go in the pages we have already created?

It’s a good idea to place your JavaScript in the <head> of your HTML page because it makes it easy to find. However, placing JavaScript there means that the entire HTML page needs to load before your JavaScript can work with the HTML. This also means that the JavaScript code will start to execute before the entire page loads. As a result, you will need to test to see whether the HTML page has loaded before you run your JavaScript program.

There has been a recent move to put JavaScript right before the </body> at the end of an HTML document to make sure that the whole page loads before the JavaScript runs. However, because we are going to test to see whether the page has loaded in JavaScript before we run our <canvas> program, we will put our JavaScript in the traditional <head> location. If you are not comfortable with this, you can adapt the style of the code to your liking.

No matter where you put the code, you can place it inline in the HTML page or load an external .js file. The code for loading an external JavaScript file might look like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="canvasapp.js"></script>

To make things simple, we will code our JavaScript inline in the HTML page. However, if you know what you are doing, saving an external file and loading it will work just as well.

Note

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