End of file seen when looking for tag name. Ignoring tag.

The document ends in the middle of a tag name, as in a final </html with no closing >, so the parser throws that unfinished tag away.

The validator only reports this when the last characters of the file are < or </ followed by letters, with nothing after them: </html, </body, <div, even </ht. The parser is still reading the tag name when the file runs out. Other endings get other messages. A bare < or </ gives End of file after “<”., and a space or line break after the name gives Saw end of file without the previous tag ending with “>”.

Usually the file has just lost its last character. The final > of a template got deleted during an edit, or a build step trimmed one byte too many. A response that the server stopped sending partway through ends the same way. If the lost tag is </html or </body, the page still looks right, because browsers close those elements at the end of the file anyway. A start tag like <script or <div is different: that element never makes it into the page.

Add the missing > or the rest of the tag. If the source file already ends with the full tag, fetch the page with curl and check the last line the server sends. A cut-off copy means something trims the HTML after the template renders it, such as an output filter or a proxy.

Invalid example

The file ends right after </html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Opening hours</title>
</head>
<body>
  <p>Open daily from 10:00 to 18:00.</p>
</body>
</html

Valid example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Opening hours</title>
</head>
<body>
  <p>Open daily from 10:00 to 18:00.</p>
</body>
</html>

Learn more:

MDN Reference

MDN Web Docs: Tag

→

MDN Reference

MDN Web Docs: The HTML document element

→

WHATWG Spec

HTML Standard: Parsing HTML documents

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