The reason being that if you are not closing all your tags it
can become a guessing game for the parser where the CSS declaration may end
in various parts of the document.
It always strikes me that when using HTML4 you are at the mercy of the arbitoriness of the parser.
There is nothing to stop us writing "well-formed" HTML. Elements which have optional closing tags are just that - optional.
It also strikes me that if you are writing HTML 4 against the DTD then Parsers will have no difficulty "guessing" where blocks end, optional end tags or not. Have you have ever pulled the render tree out of IE6 and seen what happens to lovely well-formed XHTML?.. It's parser strips out the optional closing tags and changes elements to upper case. The CSS still renders as expected. (as expected on IE not by the rec :)
David Hyatt (quoted in my previous post) seems to say that current browsers can render HTML faster and have fewer problems rendering it than with XML. While I'd prefer him to fix it, there it is. Brendan Eich also seems to support Hayatt's assertions about this in this interview, http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail156.html
Are there references with some authority which support the other case; That XHTML parsing is better and faster?
Cheers, Chris
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