THE XML REVOLUTION - TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE WEB

Browsers are forgiving

Most HTML documents are in fact not valid:

Even so, most HTML pages look fine:

<h2>Lousy HTML</h1> <li><a>This is not very</b> good. <li><i>In fact, it is quite <g>bad</g></em> </ul> But the browser does <a naem=suck>something.	Lousy HTML This is not very good. In fact, it is quite bad But the browser does something.

This is problematic:

it promotes bad HTML
different browsers do different "clever" things
it is very hard to use invalid documents for other things than browsing, e.g. for automatic processing by other tools!

A different approach is HTML Tidy, which attempts to correct errors automatically in HTML documents.

Lousy HTML