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

Suppose you are writing a tool that detects the beginning and end of script blocks in a chunk of text. Suppose you see

")

print("

Without knowing the syntax of the script language, how does your tool know that this is ONE script block and not TWO script blocks with ")blah between them?

A web browser is such a tool. It's a reasonable practice to make sure you never confuse the web browser by never having in your file unless it actually is a script tag.