[fabiomaia]

That's true. Presumably this is for extreme cases when you really need that extra bit of performance.

Perhaps HTML could have been better designed with performance in mind. Every tag you open (i.e. <foo>) you're supposed to close (i.e. </foo>) which is quite redundant in terms of bytes when you think about it. It is easy to imagine markup languages that minimize the number of bytes the client has to transfer.