Although JavaScript is a very forgiving language, over the years it has become large and complex. There are certainly ways in which the unwary can be caught out. Even long experienced script developers are taken unawares from time to time.

We present warning sub-sections summarized under each topic. Several pitfalls are so large as to warrant a topic of their own. These are some examples:

• Accidentally closing </SCRIPT> tags within the script itself

• Interpreting punctuation as tags

• Quotes can be a problem

• Hiding scripts from old browsers

• Line breaks in document.write() methods

• Browser detection for handling layers

The topic names (and hence their lexical order in this reference) are summarized in the See Also list.