Differences from XML

HTML is currently an application of SGML, not XML, and unfortunately there are some minor differences in syntax. HTML takes advantage of a number of tag minimization techniques that SGML allows. In the early days of the Web, these were quite useful because Web page authors had to use standard text editors to create HTML documents and key every character in the tags. With the advent of WYSIWYG HTML editors that generate the tags automatically (behind the scenes), the issue of minimization is no longer relevant (this also being the primary reason for omitting such features from the XML standard).

Element minimization

The most obvious and widely used technique in HTML 4.0 is the omission of end-tags. Very often, the end of an ...

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