That might be a parse error according to validator, but it's actually a pretty commonly used hack for old Internet Explorers - real browsers drop such invalid declaration, while IE (up to 6 I think, although 7 still accepted some other character IIRC) parsed it anyway and ignored the asterisk. What's more - this quirk is commonly used with, guess what, the "zoom" property, which is one of the common ways to trigger "hasLayout" mode in IE engine (although you'd most likely use it with value "1" instead of "2").
So this NN simply wrote a compatibility hack for IE6 :)
That might be a parse error according to validator, but it's actually a pretty commonly used hack for old Internet Explorers - real browsers drop such invalid declaration, while IE (up to 6 I think, although 7 still accepted some other character IIRC) parsed it anyway and ignored the asterisk. What's more - this quirk is commonly used with, guess what, the "zoom" property, which is one of the common ways to trigger "hasLayout" mode in IE engine (although you'd most likely use it with value "1" instead of "2").
So this NN simply wrote a compatibility hack for IE6 :)