[hackrmn]

Can you think of a minor syntax error example that you believe should be corrected by the browser, and better than the author would (had the Web browser notified them early -- by aborting rendering as was the case with XML)?

There's a bit of irony with the fact that HTML 4 which _did_ have browser "correct" errors (albeit in non-standardised manner) _was_ what motivated XML in the first place -- it's just that in light of the wildly different correction behaviour between Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, etc, they decided on a pragmatic solution -- abort and tell author, like a C/C++ compiler. The latter can also correct syntax errors, strictly speaking -- but you'd be hard pressed to find a programmer that would seriously consider letting the compiler do that. Why HTML should be different?

Say you forgot a `</p>` and then comes a `<li>` -- since `li` elements cannot be children of paragraph elements, I guess the Web browser, in compliance with HTML 5 for example, could mandate that the paragraph ends just before the `<li>`, meaning it behaves as if there _was_ a `</p>` before the former, _and_ also inserts... what, a `<ul>`? Why not `ol`, then? This heuristics is messy, if only because the Web browser doesn't have enough context to _know_ what the author wants, and can't assume a single kind of omission. And HTML 5 simply defines some default behaviour, handwaving the problem, but the truth is no HTML 5 authors -- myself included (I have been writing HTML in one [proto-]form or another since 1994) -- ever remember what those rules _are_.