html script tag not using type javascript <script type=“text/html”>?

Question

I was checking out the source on an html page and came across this

<script id="searchItemTemplate" type="text/html"> 
    <# var rows = Math.floor((Model.RecordsPerPage - 1) / 3 + 1);
       for (var i = 0; i < rows; ++i){
        var startIdx = i * 3;
        var endIdx = startIdx + 3;
    #>
//etc .... 
</script>

I have never seen this before. What is script type="text/html" . I don't know if it makes a difference but this was on a .aspx page.

Answer 1

Script elements that have an unknown content-type are simply ignored, in this case, the browser doesn't know how to execute a text/html script.

It's a common technique used by some JavaScript templating engines.

See also:

• JavaScript Micro-Templating
• JavaScript Templating Engines

Answer 2

It's a trick that I first saw in a John Resig blog post. It's used for stuff like holding a template to be expanded later. The browser won't make any attempt to execute it.

The "benefits"? Well, it's a lot neater than keeping a string in your Javascript code directly. Because you don't have multi-line strings in Javascript, it's messy to define a template like that.

edit — ha ha yes, CMS has linked the very blog post in his answer!