Why use \\x3C instead of < when generating HTML from JavaScript?
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 ): <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.1/jquery.js"></script> <script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="js/libs/jquery-1.6.1.min.js">\x3C/script>')</script> My question is, why is the last < character in the document.write() statement replaced with the escape sequence \x3C ? < is a safe character in JavaScript and is even used earlier in the same string, so why escape it there? Is it just to