Why use \x3C instead of < when generating HTML from JavaScript?

Question

I see the following HTML code used a lot to load jQuery from a content delivery network, but fall back to a local copy if the CDN is unavailable (e.g. in the Modernizr docs)

Answer 1

Some parsers handle the < version as the closing tag and interpret the code as

\x3C is hexadecimal for <. Those are interchangable within the script.