Well, to parsing it for machines yes, but for humans writing and reading it they are helpful. For example, if you have
<p> foo
<p> bar
and change it to
<div> foo
<div> bar
suddenly you've got a syntax error (or some quirks mode rendering with nested divs).
The "redundancy" of closing the tags acts basically like a checksum protecting against the "background radiation" of human editing.
And if you're writing raw HTML without an editor that can autocomplete the closing tags then you're doing it wrong anyway.
Yes that used to be common before and yes it's a useful backwards compatibility / newbie friendly feature for the language, but that doesn't mean you should use it if you know what you're doing.
Well, to parsing it for machines yes, but for humans writing and reading it they are helpful. For example, if you have
and change it to suddenly you've got a syntax error (or some quirks mode rendering with nested divs).The "redundancy" of closing the tags acts basically like a checksum protecting against the "background radiation" of human editing. And if you're writing raw HTML without an editor that can autocomplete the closing tags then you're doing it wrong anyway. Yes that used to be common before and yes it's a useful backwards compatibility / newbie friendly feature for the language, but that doesn't mean you should use it if you know what you're doing.