By "don't close your tags", I mean "don't close your tags when the HTML spec does not require you to." You still need to close your <a>, <div>, and <span> tags. You don't need to close your <li>, <th>, <tr>, <td>, <dl>, <dt>, and several other tags. You don't even need to open your <html> and <head> tags, if you're not doing funky stuff like putting comments in them.
Rendered html that will be sent has an http response should have ending tags. That doesn't mean the programmer/designer has to write them:
#a dumb ruby example:
def p(content)
"<p>"+content+"</p>"
end