Is `. That's because script parsers only ignore the start tag of the comment, the end tag still has to be special-cased. – Frédéric Hamidi Jan 20 '14 at 19:45

Question

In older browsers, it was required to have these comments inserted because the browsers couldn't parse the javascript properly. it would try to literally parse the javascript as html which caused script execution failures.

Today, browsers don't need this.

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 20 '14 at 19:20

In older browsers, it was required to have these comments inserted because the browsers couldn't parse the javascript properly. it would try to literally parse the javascript as html which caused script execution failures.

Today, browsers don't need this.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 20 '14 at 20:45

1

It's not.

If you go to the standard, you'll see that a < can only exist in a RelationalExpression, which <!-- is not as it hasn't got anything on the left-hand side.

answered Jan 20 '14 at 20:45

eis

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 20 '14 at 19:19

0

Comments in Javascript are like other C-type languages (// for single line, /* */ for blocks.

answered Jan 20 '14 at 19:19

Dan H

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Let me try again then, but it's clearly been answered by this point. Expression wise it is not valid javascript, but it is ignored by a lot of interpreters today due to it's previous (hacked) usage as described above. < is a numeric comparison operator, ! is the 'not' operator, and -- is an arithmetic operator. If I were to theorize, if this hack was never used and thus ignored by parsers today, just writing – Dan H Jan 20 '14 at 19:40