HTML Optional Tags

The cluster discusses the validity of omitting closing tags and wrapper elements like <html>, <head>, and <body> in HTML, browser parsing behavior, and compliance with HTML specifications.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Web Development
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#2752
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Keywords

berkshirehathaway.com BTW whatwg.org EM JSON html.spec syntax.html CDATA HTML5 W3C html tags closing tag spec elements element browsers pre span

Sample Comments

luchs • Sep 17, 2016 • View on HN

Not really liberal - leaving out those tags is perfectly fine according to the specification and all compliant browsers will create the same DOM from it.

marginalia_nu • Dec 30, 2023 • View on HN

HTML has this, yet browsers seem to cope...?

lelandfe • Jan 12, 2025 • View on HN

`` in the source :)

em-bee • Nov 10, 2024 • View on HN

HTML allows to omit closing tags for , and others

johnrob • Dec 20, 2007 • View on HN

"No closing tag": nice, I wonder how (non-X) html became so unruly ;)

piracyde25 • Jun 9, 2018 • View on HN

This and generally other HTML tag codes aren't supported atm. Otherwise, it looks clean I like it :)

ufo • Mar 11, 2015 • View on HN

This is good for hand-written html but annoying for machine-written html.

Izmaki • Jan 9, 2021 • View on HN

What about the standard ...... tags?

twodayslate • Oct 4, 2013 • View on HN

That's the weirdest way to format HTML I've ever seen

tzs • Aug 18, 2023 • View on HN

What if the document has omitted the tag?