What effect has no close tags for HTML input field on browsers?

I came across a production HTML page which has no close tag for one of the input fields.

This production system has been running for quite a while and targeting only IE6 browsers.

I would like to do a check with everyone here, as i am striving to give a good reason to raise a defect fix开发者_运维知识库, are there any good supporting reasons for doing such?

What is the doctype of the page? That should validate with an HTML 4.01 doctype. However, it will NOT validate as XHTML.

Chin,

Most (if not all) browsers will imply the end tag for things like input, br, img and p which traditionally have been mis-coded.

Some parsers (specifically I know of iText to create PDF from HTML documents) require absolute perfect HTML, but you can use another tools such as jTidy to fix that on the fly.

Brian