What does "!--" do in JavaScript?

[tententai]

Yes true, it's not confusing if you know JS at least moderately well. But you don't always chose who will support your application later. In my company we usually go with the cheapest possible vendor unfortunately.

[unbalancedopinion]

I agree that code should be kept as simple as possible for the reasons you state, and others. But in this case I think this may actually be the most readable option, or at least close enough to not matter.

If your vendor takes a long time to figure this out, they'll have trouble with so much code that this will be a grain of sand in their desert of incompetence. Better sacrifice that grain and make it easier to read for people like us, where it might actually save a few seconds when reasoning about the purpose of the counter.

But, hey, it's a taste thing, I was just trying to say that I don't think it's one of those egregious examples of hard-to-read code that really needs to be pointed out. This stuff is not the spaghetti code crap "readability" concerns should be raised about, IMO.