The Book of JavaScript, 2nd Edition

Dealing with Older Browsers

There's a slight problem with the JavaScript skeleton in Figure 1-4 (besides the fact that it doesn't really have any JavaScript in it): Netscape didn't introduce the <script> tag until version 2.0 of Netscape Navigator, so any browser released before 1997 won't recognize the tag.

When a browser sees an HTML tag it doesn't understand, it just ignores that tag. That's generally a good thing. However, a browser that doesn't understand JavaScript will write your lines of JavaScript to the browser as text. Figure 1-5 shows how the JavaScript skeleton in Figure 1-4 would be displayed in an older browser.

Figure 1-5. What Figure 1-4 ...