What people don't get about the web is that there is a significant (and growing) number of pages written by people who are now dead. So all the well-intentioned

What people don't get about the web is that there is a significant (and growing) number of pages written by people who are now dead. So all the well-intentioned ideas about "cleaning up" html - it's not going to happen. It's not a question about being pro or con closing tags or which is "best". The question is about the billions of pages which already exist and is not going to change. If you write a web scraper, that is just the reality you work with.