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Most examples I've seen have scripts in a html page being enclosed by
<!--
...
-->
I've tried writing it without the comment tags and there doesn't seem to be any difference. Why is the comment tag used and what function does it serve?
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Single line comments start with // . Any text between // and the end of the line will be ignored by JavaScript (will not be executed).
The <script> HTML element is used to embed executable code or data; this is typically used to embed or refer to JavaScript code. The <script> element can also be used with other languages, such as WebGL's GLSL shader programming language and JSON.
The JavaScript comments are meaningful way to deliver message. It is used to add information about the code, warnings or suggestions so that end user can easily interpret the code. The JavaScript comment is ignored by the JavaScript engine i.e. embedded in the browser.
It's not really necessary any more. This has only ever served as a backwards-compatibility hack of sorts - when scripts first started being inserted into static HTML pages, most browsers couldn't support them. Without the comments, they would ignore the semantics of the <script> tag (which they didn't understand), and then would emit the script source onto the page.
Ironically, the solution was a hack in itself - AFAIK, no part of the HTML spec says that script tags should be parsed when inside of comments. The fact that all browsers picked this up seems to be more of a coincidence than anything else. Certainly with XHTML, comments are comments so a fully conformant browser would have to ignore your scripts.
So basically, unless you want to support really, really old browsers (at the cost of breaking some new ones) it's no longer necessary to do this.
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