Why is this phantom empty tag showing up in IE developer tools?

There is a phantom empty tag (<>) showing up in IE's developer tools HTML tab.

Here's a snippet of the actual HTML source, with a few irrelevant portions removed:

<td><img src="1.jpg"></td>
<!--start mo script-->
<div id="mo">
<script type="text/java开发者_如何学Goscript" src="mo.js"></script>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
setTimeout('timeOutMO()', 5000);
function timeOutMO() { 
   document.getElementById("mo").innerHTML = "";
}
</script>
<!--end mo script-->
<td><img src="2.jpg"></td>

In both Firefox's Firebug and Chrome's debugger, the nodes are shown as expected, with the <td>, <div>, <script>, and <td> nodes as siblings.

But in IE's debugger, I get a phantom empty node that's messing things up. It looks like this:

<td>
   <img src="1.jpg">
</td>
<!--start mo script-->
<>
   <div id="mo">
      <script type="text/javascript" src="mo.js"></script>
   </div>
   <script type="text/javascript">...</script>
   <!--end mo script-->
</>
<td>
   <img src="2.jpg">
</td>

IE is basically treating the div and script inside the empty tag not as siblings of the td tags but as nephews and nieces.

Anybody know why?

What you are doing violates the HTML standard. Every browser will handle strange cases like those differently. Why not wrap it in a td?