Enterprise HTML

Not closing an img tag is not lazy HTML; it's actually correct HTML. HTML bans closing img tags! (At least some versions still in use, I haven't exhaustively checked them all.) See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/objects.html#h-13.2 , right below the declaration of the tag: "Start tag: required, End tag: forbidden" Of course, including them doesn't do anything bad, but they're still not supposed to be there. (Nor should you <img src="..." />, that's an illegal empty attribute called "/".)

There are a lot of misconceptions about what standards-complaint HTML is. For example, before I went and looked up the link I just gave, I thought they were optional. Nope.

XHTML is a different story, of course, but you didn't say XHTML. Probably because you're not using it. Nobody sane does.

If you agree that code is good, you need to bone up on your HTML. <img> tags are self-closing in all versions of HTML (as far as I can recall), and the end tag is specifically invalid in later versions. In XHTML, you can write it that way, but using the self-closing syntax (<img/>) is more efficient and readable. A closing <img> tag is wasteful at best and invalid at worst.