Why do this? <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript"

Hi;

I've being going through some legacy code on an old JSP site I have
been patching.  I noticed that when I save the JSP down to my PC as an
HTML file I get this javascript error in IE 6 (  not in the latest
Firefox ):

"invalid character"

The problem traces back to this line of code:

<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript"  SRC="abc/jsp/blah.js"></SCRIPT>

It goes away if I remove the "text/".

I have never seen a script tag with "TYPE" or "text/javascript"
used.   Only  "language = "javascript""

What is <SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript"  used for?   Is it necessary?

Thanks in advance