Comment by imiric

The author has a point, but I object to this mischaracterization:

> XHTML, being based on XML as opposed to SGML, is notorious for being author-unfriendly due to its strictness

This strictness is a moot point. Most editors will autocomplete the closing tag for you, so it's hardly "unfriendly". Besides, if anything, closing tags are reader-friendly (which includes the author), since they make it clear when an element ends. In languages that don't have this, authors often add a comment like `// end of ...` to clarify this. The article author even acknowledges this in some of their examples ("explicit end tags added for clarity").

But there were other potential benefits of XHTML that never came to pass. A strict markup language would make documents easier to parse, and we wouldn't have ended up with the insanity of parsing modern HTML, which became standardized. This, in turn, would have made it easier to expand the language, and integrate different processors into the pipeline. Technologies like XSLT would have been adopted and improved, and perhaps we would have already had proper HTML modules, instead of the half-baked Web Components we have today. All because browser authors were reluctant to force website authors to fix their broken markup. It was a terrible tradeoff, if you ask me.

So, sure, feel free to not close HTML tags if you prefer not to, and to "educate" everyone that they shouldn't either. Just keep it away from any codebases I maintain, thank you very much.

To be fair, I don't mind not closing empty elements, such as `<img>` or `<br>`. But not closing `<p>` or `<div>` is hostile behavior, for no actual gain.