HTML Script tag: type or language (or omit both)?

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The language attribute has been deprecated for a long time, and should not be used.

When W3C was working on HTML5, they discovered all browsers have “text/javascript” as the default script type, so they standardized it to be the default value. Hence, you don’t need type either.

For pages in XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01 omitting type is considered invalid. Try validating the following:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<script src="http://example.com/test.js"></script>
</head>
<body/>
</html>

You will be informed of the following error:

Line 4, Column 41: required attribute “type” not specified

So if you’re a fan of standards, use it. It should have no practical effect, but, when in doubt, may as well go by the spec.

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