Question

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When serving JavaScript files, is it better to use the application/javascript or application/x-javascript

what is difference between text/javascript and application/javascript?

As IE will completely ignore the script tag if you have set type attribute to application/javascript.

But what is the main difference and in which case we need to use the particular.

Answer 1

text/javascript was introduced when the web was young and people hadn’t thought things through.

Then people thought things through, and decided that text/* should be reserved for things designed to be human readable (which is why some XML is text/xml and other XML is application/xml). JavaScript is not human readable, so text/javascript was deprecated and application/javascript was introduced to replace it.

Years later, some browsers still haven’t caught up.

You can configure your server to always serve application/javascript in the HTTP headers; browsers that don’t support it also pay no attention to the actual content-type.

For the time being, if you are writing HTML 4 or XHTML 1, specify text/javascript in the type attribute for the sake of backwards compatibility. If you are writing HTML 5, then omit the type attribute (as it is now optional).