What is the reason browsers do not correctly recognize:
Only
Others have answered "how" and quoted spec. Here is the real story of "why no ", after many hours digging into bug reports and mailing lists.
HTML 4
HTML 4 is based on SGML.
SGML has some shorttags, such as
, text>
, , or
.
XML takes the first form, redefines the ending as ">" (SGML is flexible), so that it becomes item
.
However, HTML did not redfine, so should mean