Why do we use <script> for scripts, but not <style> for external CSS?
A relative of mine who started to learn Web Development asked me this question.
Why <script src="min.js"></script> and <link rel="stylesheet" href="min.css">? Why not <style href="min.css"></style>. Why do we use link tag to add external CSS in the page but when we link CSS to page but we use <style>...</style> when we write CSS inside <head>?
I told him that it's because of spec. Is there any more info to give to him?
Answer
It's historical... coincidence? You can recommend him reading part about Past of diveintohtml5.info, where there are some interesting stories, actually mail correspondences, between web developers. Web developers means they were, in fact, developing the Web we see nowadays ;)
I.e. <img> tag we are used to:
<IMG SRC="file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm">
could be:
<ICON name="NoEntry" href="http://note/foo/bar/NoEntry.xbm">
or
<A HREF="..." INCLUDE>See photo</A>
or
<INCLUDE HREF="...">
but finally devs decided to stick with <img>, which was already implemented:
We’re not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point. … So we’re probably going to go with (not ICON, since not all inlined images can be meaningfully called icons). For the time being, inlined images won’t be explicitly content-type’d; down the road, we plan to support that (along with the general adaptation of MIME). Actually, the image reading routines we’re currently using figure out the image format on the fly, so the filename extension won’t even be significant.
I don't know direct answer to your question, but I'm pretty curious about <link> tag, too. Finding answer would probably include some web archives digging.