but I want to encourage everybody to write "right" HTML

Hmm. You are aware that in HTML, the close tag on an LI element is completely optional, and still validates? So it's "right" HTML. Truly. It's not tag soup with error correction. It really is "right" HTML.

Surely it's not XHTML, but the rules are different there. No optional close tags, for example. And all your attributes must be quoted. And a few other miscellaneous things.

But the original request was for HTML, so I kept my version of the program simple.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker