Douglas Crockford, one of the great authorities and teachers of Javascript, has this to say:
language="javascript"
This attribute has been deprecated. It
was used to select other programming
languages and specific versions of
JavaScript. You don't need it. Don't
use it.
type="text/javascript"
This attribute is optional. Since
Netscape 2, the default programming
language in all browsers has been
JavaScript. In XHTML, this attribute
is required and unnecessary. In HTML,
it is better to leave it out. The
browser knows what to do.
Your boss may be doing this for the "right" or the "wrong" reasons (i.e. he may be following Crockford's advice, or he may just be lazy), but I don't think you can necessarily make a judgement. If the rest of his HTML and JS is sloppy, that's another thing. I'd venture that the contents of the script tag could be more of a religious thing like tab size or brace placement.
Edit: @coffeeaddict has pointed out that not putting the proper attributes into the tag messes up his compiles. I'd say that trumps any consideration of whether the attributes are strictly correct or necessary, because projects should always build cleanly without errors or warnings. Same goes for validators, etc, if they are part of the project standard.
