What is "<![if !supportEmptyParas]>&nbsp;<![endif]>"?

[Lisae]

I'm a publisher for an Intranet site that already existed before I got here. I've been running across the following code on some of the documents I'm working on, and was wondering if anyone could explaining it to me. The code is:

<![if !supportEmptyParas]>& n b s p ;<![endif]>

(I added the spaces in the non-breaking space so that it would show up right.) I've got one page that must have it several hundred times. Is that XML? Does it do anything? I'm finding that a lot of people here use the "Save As a Web Page" from various MS Office products, and it throws in a lot of junk code that I've been cleaning out. Could this be more auto-generated junk code? Thanks for any input you have on this!

[AdamGundry]

That looks like an IE conditional comment (http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/ccomment_ovw.asp). It basically prevents IE 5 or 6 from rendering the &amp;nbsp; if they permit empty paragraphs to be rendered. It's not standards compliant, but then the Save As "Web Page" feature doesn't worry about things like standards anyway.

Adam