HTML - Closing tag on next line. Why?

Herk

<div class="clearfix rMenu-center">
<ul id="middlemenu" class="clearfix rMenu-hor rMenu"
	><li class="rMenu-expand"
		><a href="http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/">Layouts</a
		> <ul class="rMenu-ver"
			><li

Can somebody please explain why this would be written this way. I know there is a good reason to put whitespace before <ul> but why close the tags just before opening the next on these <li>'s?

dagon

personal preference? weird but possible, more likely some formatting tool gone wrong.

Herk

You might check out the website that shows in the code. This guys does a really fantastic job at what he does and is able to compensate for seemingly every browser bug. I'm just saying I don't think it is a mistake. I emailed him to ask but have not heard back. I was hoping somebody had seen it before.

dagon

I see no benefit, and while it still renders valid html it would confuse me.

Weedpacket

I've seen docbook->html converters do this with its tags but in a more extreme fashion - every tag on a line of its own, with no indentation:

<HTML
<HEAD
<TITLE
Blah</TITLE
</HEAD
<BODY...

Once upon a time, browsers (particularly IE) had great problems understanding what to do with newlines and other whitespace that appeared between tags. Is it supposed to be rendered as a space or not? The solution was to write the page in such a way that it was a non-issue.