Where to place JavaScript in an HTML file?

Question

Say I have a fairly hefty JavaScript file, packed down to roughly 100kb or so. By file I mean it’s an external file that would be linked in via

Answer 1

The best place for it is just before you need it and no sooner.

Also, depending on your users' physical location, using a service like Amazon's S3 service may help users download it from a server physically closer to them than your server.

Is your js script a commonly used lib like jQuery or prototype? If so, there are a number of companies, like Google and Yahoo, that have tools to provide these files for you on a distributed network.