Perfectly valid html5 page

valid.html

<ul>
  <li> item one
  <li> item two
  <li> item three
</ul>

<table>
  <caption> Selector engines, parse direction</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr><th>Left to right        <th>Right to left
  <tbody>
    <tr><td>Mootools             <td>Sizzle
    <tr><td>Sly                  <td>YUI 3
    <tr><td>Peppy                <td>NnMatcher
    <tr><td>Dojo Acme            <td>querySelectorAll
    <tr><td>Ext JS
    <tr><td>Prototype.js
</table>

The fact that this is valid is why I don't understand why people don't like xhtml.

Is this valid xhtml? Also I don't see a lot of xhtml hate...

Also, for reference, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WxmcDoAxdoY#! ~ 17minute mark

No its not valid xhtml. No one hates xhtml, they just don't use it. I like all tags to have an opening and closing, or be explicitly closed (e.g.
is valid xhtml, ?
is not).

Different strokes then. Omitting closing tags on

and makes for the source code to structurally mirror the presentation, which in my opinion improves readability for documents. It also incidentally saves time and memory. For non-document data it is still closer to most DOM presenter.

If one likes semicolons in code, they probably like closing tags. I for one can do without the visual clutter (though am not yet ready to go full-lisp :) )