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I find not closing my <li>s and many of my table tags (e.g. https://gist.github.com/1117438) lends to much more readable and maintainable markup. <head> and <body> I'd leave explicitly there, the tag autogeneration rules conflict with HTML5 elements in oldIE.

IMO, you shouldn't ever drop optional tags for a byte payload reason, this is what minifiers are for (htmlcompressor is extremely robust). But sometimes it makes sense to drop some closing tags so your source isn't an overgrown garden of angle brackets.



Not closing <li>s is much easier to maintain. Look at my web page for instance, https://ajf.me/

It's not only easier, but more readable to do this:

    <ul>
        <li>Item 1
        <li>Another item
        <li>Yet another item
    </ul>
Than this:

    <ul>
        <li>Item 1</li>
        <li>Another item</li>
        <li>Yet another item</li>
    </ul>


If your list is that simple, it takes no extra effort to add closing tags (especially if you're using a worthwhile IDE). If your list is more complicated, the closing tags will increase readability while decreasing ambiguity (and again they require no extra effort in a good IDE). This kind of thing might make sense for Google as a way to cut down on bandwidth costs over a long period of time, but it's a bad practice for 99% of the people reading it.




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