Seprarately Bracketing Attributes

I ran into a problem yesterday when I tried using <td> <colspan="2"> 
instead of <td colspan="2">. When I got home, I looked through my 
HTML book and saw that some attributes can be placed within their own 
angle brackets and some can't. Why not make a uniform rule for this? 
I think all attributes should be contained in their own brackets 
after their parent tag.

Is this just a problem with non-compliant browsers?

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