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Tags can't overlap

HTML browsers don't often worry about how you nest tags; XHTML does. For example, in HTML you can, although you shouldn't, overlap tags like this:

This is <b><i>bold and italic</b></i> text.

HTML browser's don't care whether you close the </b> first or the </i> first. This may be wrong (it is wrong), but they really don't care.

XHTML browsers, on the other hand, do care. They absolutely insist that you get the nesting right:

This is <b><i>bold and italic</i></b> text.