JavaScript not executing in Internet Explorer 8

I’ve been caught out by this on numerous occasions and still haven’t learnt my lesson. So in an attempt to remember in the future and perhaps help somebody else out, here’s the situation. Take the following script declaration

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" />

This may look valid and probably should be, but Internet Explorer thinks the script tag hasn’t been closed, which means any script blocks after it will be ignored. The declaration needs to be

<script type="text/javascript" src="Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js"></script>