Fedora and fallback DNS servers

HTML5 solves that problem by specifying that you can just write <td> and then a closing tag is inferred at the next <td> or <th>, or at the end of the <tr>. This is not considered "error handling," either. It's perfectly legal to omit the closing tag, and the result is considered a well-formed HTML5 document. This was certainly never the case in XHTML, although I'm not sure how HTML4 handled this sort of chicanery.

If you do include the slash, it just strips it out and emits a parse error, so you would end up with an unclosed <td>. But as discussed in the previous paragraph, that <td> will probably close itself anyway, and so it hardly matters.

Incidentally, you can also do this with <p>, meaning you can write prose like this:

<p>
Here is a paragraph of text...
<p>
Here is a second paragraph...
<p>
[and so on]

This is also considered well-formed HTML5.