What is CDATA in HTML?

Since it is useful to be able to use less-than signs (<) and ampersands (&) in web page scripts, and to a lesser extent styles, without having to remember to escape them, it is common to use CDATA markers around the text of inline and elements in XHTML documents. But so that the document can also be parsed by HTML parsers, which do not recognise the CDATA markers, the CDATA markers are usually commented-out, as in this JavaScript example:

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
document.write("<");
//]]>
</script>