text: The self closing script tag won't work, because the script tag can contain inline code, and HTML is not smart enough to turn on or off that feature based on the presence of an attribute.
  On the other hand, HTML does have an excellent tag for including references to outside resources: the <link> tag, and it can be self-closing. It's already used to include stylesheets, RSS and Atom feeds, canonical URIs, and all sorts of other goodies. Why not JavaScript?
  If you want the script tag to be self enclosed you can't do that as I said, but there is an alternative, though not a smart one. You can use the self closing link tag and link to your JavaScript by giving it a type of text/javascript and rel as script, something like below:
  Unlike XML and XHTML, HTML has no knowledge of the self-closing syntax. Browsers that interpret XHTML as HTML don't know that the / character indicates that the tag should be self-closing; instead they interpret it like an empty attribute and the parser still thinks the tag is 'open'.
  Just as <script defer> is treated as <script defer="defer">, <script /> is treated as <script /="/">.
  Internet Explorer 8 and older don't support the proper MIME type for XHTML, application/xhtml+xml. If you're serving XHTML as text/html, which you have to for these older versions of Internet Explorer to do anything, it will be interpreted as HTML 4.01. You can only use the short syntax with any element that permits the closing tag to be omitted. See the HTML 4.01 Specification.