possible missing '>' bug in HTML 4 validator

I am not a member of this list, but lately I have been using the HTML and
CSS validators a lot.  They are extremely useful tools, and I appreciate the
hard work of those involved in these validation projects.

Today I was surprised to see a validated page of mine which rendered
strangely.  It was validated late last night, and I must have been too tired
to notice that part of the text on the page was in the wrong font family. 
After half an hour of trying to figure out what it was, I finally saw it --
a missing end-brace on a </tt> tag.

Here is the problem code, with the uncaught error:

- - - - - - - - - -
<!doctype HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
...
<tt><b><a href="vl_st05.html">&lt;=- Prev</a> &nbsp;
<a href="vl_st00.html">Wrap -=:&gt;</a></b></tt<br>
</div>
- - - - - - - - - -

Text following this, even past the "</div>", was still rendered in the
teletype (monospace) font.  The validator obviously thought there was a <tt>
... </tt> pair, when in fact there was no termination due to the missing
end-brace.  Here is the "no attributes" parse tree for the above code:

- - - - - - - - - -
      <TT>
        <B>
	   <=- Prev   Wrap -=:>
        </B>
      </TT>      // nope, did not happen
      <BR>
      </BR>
    </DIV>
- - - - - - - - - -

The page will be fixed by the time you read this, but for reference its URL
is:

    http://dbatitan.home.att.net/vp/vl_st06.html

I would apppreciate responses being cc'd to me.  Thank you very much.


=====
-- Rich
-- http://rocq.home.att.net
==

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Received on Thursday, 17 October 2002 00:35:44 UTC