What does this mean: “[removed]('<scr'+'ipt… ”?

Question

I\'ve seen this on every Yahoo! news page, at the bottom of the source code,
and failed to understand why they break the script word like that.
<

Answer 1

Consider this simplified example:

 something");

The browser's HTML parser would see the within the JavaScript string and interpret that as the end of the script element.

The HTML parser doesn't know about JavaScript syntax - all it knows is that the .

(It also knows that you can't have nested in your example.)