Love finding weird comments like this in code

But really, imagine being the person that had to debug IE and create this hack

at least they document and comment.
imagine your life without that comment and that code.

I didn't understand the purpose of this, could someone explain?

@oscarascal cross-browser support for parsing the text without the <br> tag (since some browsers define the node differently).

So he replaces all the tags with a hash presumably to later parse the text in the same manner no matter what browser you use.