<i>Mostly due to the tag-closing behaviour.</i><p>I guess I don't really understand this; best practice in HTML is to close tags and quote attributes just as in XHTML. The only difference is XHTML requires it.<p>As for self-closing tags, the only one I use, at all, is &#60;img&#62;, and I'm perfectly OK with having to handle that (largely because I <i>don't</i>; there are already libraries which will generate my HTML for me).