In HTML you can leave out the end tag in cases where they can be unambiguously inferred, like: <p>First paragraph<p>Second paragraph</p> P-element can't be

In HTML you can leave out the end tag in cases where they can be unambiguously inferred, like: <p>First paragraph<p>Second paragraph</p> P-element can't be nested, so a <p> will automatically close the previous p-element. But this also means it is necessary to indicate the tag name in the closing tag. For example this would be ambiguous: <div><p>Hello</> It cannot be inferred if it is the div or p which is closed. XML is of course different. Since all element have to be explicitly closed, repeating the tag-name in the close tag is in principle superfluous. I think it makes it easier to read though, at the cost of more effort to write.