Optional Closing Tags in HTML

[paulj]

For as long as I've been validating web pages, I never realized that the closing tag was optional in HTML. I feel as if I've missed the boat at times.While I'm all for trimming excess code, I just cannot for the life of me strip out closing tags because they are optional in HTML. I'd be...

The closing tag is only optional (I think) in HTML3.2 and HTML4. If you use any XHTML version, the all tags must be properly closed.

[doctordew]

Yeah I've realized that. When I was writing HTML codes at the begining it took me time to realize I hadn't closed a lot of things, and yet they still work. They get caught in the html validaters though.