I would have expected the former. Given that one of the rationales of HTML5 was "simpler parsing". I'm obviously not uptodate with the HTML5 parsing. But why s

I would have expected the former. Given that one of the rationales of HTML5 was "simpler parsing". I'm obviously not uptodate with the HTML5 parsing. But why should I? Who writes HTML by hand these days? The SGML heritage of HTML 4.01 and earlier lead to some gruesome legal constructs that look surprisingly similar to your examples. Looks like every generation has to make their own mistakes.