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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

It complains about perfectly valid HTML, e.g.:

  <ul>
    <li>Item
    <li>Item
  </ul>

Why doesn't it know about optional end tags? :(

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Even though I also enjoy not closing my li's, I don't think this is an egregious error. The app appears to be focused on helping novices interested in learning HTML. To those just beginning, it's probably most important to enforce the idea of most elements having opening and closing tags.

However, if their target audience is actual developers...well, they've got lots of other problems to deal with as well.

The target audience is very much _NOT_ real developers. Think of it as "lesson 2", where "lesson 1" is something like x-ray goggles: https://webmaker.org/en-US/tools/x-ray-goggles/ for someone who _knows nothing_ to start with. Your average (not geeky) 12-year old or 70-year old, for example.

I'm a computer science graduate (aka, I hope I'm a geek) who did the whole html / css track at Code Academy in about 3 hours (aka, hopefully I'm past lesson 0, I haven't taken any web dev classes or some such ever) but trying to keep all the possible tags in my brain at once is still hard. I feel like this kind of tool does nothing if the newbie doesn't know the tags to match the ideas they have for the page.

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