Benefits of omitting closing body and html tags?

Question

Are there any benefits to omitting the closing body and html tags?

Why is the google.com homepage missing the closing body and html tags?

• edit - wit

Answer 1

Think of how many times that page is served every day. Even small reductions in size can be significant at that volume of traffic.

(Although I work for Google, please don't treat this as an "official answer from Google" - it's a guess, but an educated one.)