Web standards buddies – Do you have any hard evidence that the failure to close HTML tags is detrimental to the wellbeing of a website? I’d hate to have the wool pulled over my company’s eyes just because our vendor says ‘it’s OK, IE will display it anyway’.
Our website isn’t XHTML compliant yet, though we are required to attain one ‘A’ for accessibility. My main grouse is that our new CMS rewrites the XHTML-compliant code I paste in, removing closing tags such as ‘li’.
Research findings e.g. slower rendering time in web browsers, incompatibilities and all other reasons are welcome. The benefits of keeping clean code in order to facilitate migrating to XHTML in future is a little hard to explain at the moment, but I hope to further this cause in time.
Kindly post your findings and I’ll log in regularly to approve them all.
Comments
As far as I know, end tags are optional for html. And indeed without using the end tags for elements like p and li, you can have a smaller file size than xhtml, thus saving the bandwidth.
Here is the proof:
http://annevankesteren.nl/archives/2004/07/bandwidth
If you happen to be using CSS for presentation and you don’t close your HTML tags, how is the browser supposed to know when to stop styling an element?
How about… IE 7, when it comes out, may not display the page properly?