No, <a ... /> isn't allowed in the current HTML nesting enforcement. I doubt it will be in the next version either.

Handling people who write <a/> when they mean </a> is more important than allowing people to save a couple of keystrokes when they make anchors (or whatever they are called), especially since such are hardly ever used here.

And more featuritis would just mean it takes even longer for improvements to be deployed. But maybe in a later version... (:

And to build on tye's comment -- there's no reason for an empty anchor, even if it's not a link.

After all, if you're trying to link to something, there needs to be a something -- that something should go inside the <a> ... </a>. Even in the case of 'jump to top' or 'jump to bottom' links, you're linking to specific sections of the page, not a blank space.

Since you mentioned it, I'll also note that my personal CSS says that underlining <a ...> spans is "important", because I particularly hate the practice of removing the one (formerly) universal visual hint that "this is a link". And a side effect of this is that name= "anchors" are underlined (but not colored) so I like it when "link to here" parts are appropriately selected, such as around the heading.

Occasionally I see sites that have the "anchor" around an entire paragraph or more, which is mildly annoying but easy for me to put up with because I know the cause and the benefit still *far* outweighs this "problem". And I've gotten used to the "extra" underlines so I doubt I'll bother to learn how to apply my CSS to just non-"name=" <a ...> spans.

- tye