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Comment by Deimorz | Hacker News Reader

Edit: my original comment (retained below) is wrong about this being malformed, and it's completely valid. Some more info here: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#optional-...

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Original comment:

The fact that browsers are able to handle malformed HTML doesn't mean that you should do it that way. There's no meaningful benefit that I can think of, and the potential to break a ton of things that aren't as lenient.

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My understanding is that it is not malformed, but actually a part of the spec. Maybe someone else has a link to the appropriate part of the spec, but following someone else's link to the spec and reading it for myself is how I learned that it is not malformed.

>Tag omission in text/html:

>An html element's start tag can be omitted if the first thing inside the html element is not a comment.

>An html element's end tag can be omitted if the html element is not immediately followed by a comment.

https://www.w3.org/TR/html5/semantics.html#the-html-element

It's not malformed in the traditional meaning, the HTML5 spec actually says that HTML, HEAD, BODY, etc. unambiguous tags can be omitted.

The new craziness is basically that HTML is no longer structured as a tree, no more closing tags that don't semantically hold data, etc.

This is not malformed HTML. In fact, optional tags were in older HTML specs and are perfectly legal. Even in HTML 4.01 Strict. See: http://rimantas.com/bits/minimal_html.html

Removing optional tags is recommended here: https://google.github.io/styleguide/htmlcssguide.html

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