I thought I remember reading this was debated extensively when XML was being ratified. The consensus was that it was better for reading the markup even though i

I thought I remember reading this was debated extensively when XML was being ratified. The consensus was that it was better for reading the markup even though it made it harder to write vs SGML's empty end tag. In any non trivial HTML doc many of the close tags will be far from the start tag, such as <body></body> and looking at a bunch of </> tags and having to go match them up with the correct start tags is more difficult. I run into this all the time with parentheses in your typical programming languages. The IDE I usually use does auto close tags but also does folding both help with verbose close tags or matching parens so it doesn't matter much what the language does anymore. I generally do think html/xml is more readable because it so verbose including end tags.