: Chrome refused to execute this JavaScript file In the head of my HTML page, I have: <script src="https://raw.github.com/cloudhead/less.js/master/dist/less-1.3.3.js"></script> When I load the

@Gloria169

As bybe points out the issue is that almost all content served up by raw.github.com is sent down as a text file - that way the content is rendered in plain text in your browser without any other applications or issues getting in the way. Otherwise you would get into the situation where attempting to view a .js file might cause the browser to attempt to run it rather than show it to you.

On top of that, neither github nor pages.github are trying to be a CDN. You should really either:


Host the file yourself, it's not that large.
Use a dedicated CDN for this and other static files on your site.
Use something like cdnjs.com who have various versions of lessjs available.

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@Cofer257

Rawgithub.com allows users to take the "Raw" versions of a Git and turn it into a URL usable in <script> tags. It's quite easy to use, simply remove the first . from the raw URL. For example, this:
raw.github.com/joelambert/CSS-Animation-Store/master/cssanimationstore.js

would turn into this
rawgithub.com/joelambert/CSS-Animation-Store/master/cssanimationstore.js

and then you put it into a <script> tag with the appropriate type. That simple!

They do limit the number of requests because it is meant for development purposes only, not production.

2014 EDIT

As Reinderien mentioned, rawgithub is now just rawgit, so the new script link would be
rawgit.com/joelambert/CSS-Animation-Store/master/cssanimationstore.js

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@Shanna517

This is an intentional feature designed to prevent certain XSS attacks.

As Mike West explains, don't use raw.github.com as a CDN; use GitHub Pages instead.

Also, explicitly encoding unreserved characters won't change how the URL is treated.

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@Turnbaugh106

The problem you have is out of your control since this is how the hosting is setup at Github on the path that you have mentioned, Extension type is not only the factor when it comes to executing files since the web hosting can over-rule how a browser renders a file.

You could have a .zip file rendering as a .html file if the host was setup to do so, you can check this yourself by using firebug and viewing the header response against that is what is being requested.... so if you request a JS file but the header response returns a different expected value then the browsers will respect the header response and not whats being requested...

The github hosting on the raw subdomain is returning Content-Type text/plain; charset=utf-8 as the MIME type that means it will not exercute as JS but rather as raw text, below is an example what you would need the server to return in order to render the file, and further down is the code that is being returned by github.

A server that supports the JS MIME type will look something like:

Accept-Ranges bytes
Connection Keep-Alive
Content-Encoding gzip
Content-Length 31097
Content-Type application/javascript
Vary Accept-Encoding
Request Headersview source
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8


And this is what raw.github.com/cloudhead/less.js/master/dist/less-1.3.3.js header is responding as as (RAW VIEW).

Accept-Ranges bytes
Connection Keep-Alive
Content-Disposition inline
Content-Encoding gzip
Content-Length 41354
Content-Transfer-Encoding binary
Content-Type text/plain; charset=utf-8

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@Phylliss660

The file extension is irrelevant, it's the Content-Type header that matters, and that file is served with a text/plain content type (which is the purpose of Github's "raw" view).

You should really download a copy of the file locally to your site and include it from there. Even if it did work from Github, since you're not loading the JS file asynchronously, putting that <script> tag in your page header makes your site dependent on Github's availability.

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