[web] Do HTML anchors need to be closed?

Quote:

Original post by ManaStone Are there any general problems with not closing an anchor?

the whole block is going to be subject to the a tag, as far as CSS styles are concerned (try it - apply a CSS style of yellow to all a tags, and see if the paragraph changes colour).

The reason you aren't noticing this, is that <a name=""> tags don't have any style applied by default.

Thanks.

You should strive to write standards-conforming html, which means you should close all tags and put all attribute values in quotation marks, and you should not close outer tags inside inner tags (for instance ). The fact that browsers can be good at working around malformed code is not really a license to mutilate your code on purpose. It might break in another browser or a screen reader or xml editor.

Edit: doh, didn't think of CSS. -_-;;;

short answer: Yes. You are required to close tags