[nixpulvis]

You're totally right! Many good stock parsers already stream things (more or less).

Still, I'm just making a comment about the overhead... I would hedge a guess that you're going to have a hard time beating a regex with an HTML parser for speed, assuming what you want can be done with both.

This is all irrelevant, because as the OP mentions, the SO question at hand cannot be solved with standards compliant parsers because self-closing tags will not be distinguishable.