Hacker News Reader

Comment by msmith | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that someone went out of their way to obfuscate the interim.html script:

    document.write('<s'+'cript language="JavaScript" src="');

I guess they were intentionally trying to evade some tool that looks for '<script'?

View on HN

My theory is just overzealous protection against having the </script> end tag break that JavaScript block early. Escaping the end tag is necessary.

  document.write(adUrl+'"></s'+'cript>');

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/236073/why-split-the-scri...

Found a stack overflow question with explanation. Again, I believe, only IE couldn't handle word script in the literal string.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the pointer.

It's been awhile since I played with it, but I believe there's a legitimate reason for breaking the <script. Possibly one of the older browsers had a broken parser that would interpret that as the beginning of a new script tag?

I believe, it's some sort of IE hack.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com