Note the whitespace between comment and --< in both cases. Also note that the documentation makes no further reference to whitespace in that position.
Note also that all the examples you cite lack capital letters. And I'm pretty sure the documentation makes no further mention of capital letters in comments - with your logic, they're forbidden. In fact, following your logic, there are only two HTML comments: the examples from the documentation.

In reply to Re^2: HTML stripper... by JavaFan
in thread HTML stripper... by Anonymous Monk

Title:
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