Question

Above is the html source.

Here comes the corresponding rendered text.

I assume that <!-- --> is used for comments. Why was it used in the example with empty comments? And why were separated letters used in place of a single word aiken?

EDIT: here’s the source page https://cs.stanford.edu/faculty

Answer 1

Possible Reason: Server side code generation.

This may be generated by a server application that sometimes adds info to each letter, for example ‘letter ranking’ with server generated comments in the source, sometimes done for debugging purposes by programmers. In this case no information is present so the output just ends up with an empty comment.