HTML Guide for close tag

“Garbage after </” means a stray less-than slash is followed by text that doesn’t form a valid end tag.

This happens when the parser encounters </ that isn’t the start of a proper end tag. Valid end tags must be </tagname> where tagname is a known HTML tag, case-insensitive, with no spaces before the closing >. Common causes include typos (</ div>), accidental text like </-- or </br>, unescaped markup in text (you meant to show </div> as text), or leftover characters after a correct end tag (e.g., </p>foo where foo wasn’t intended). If you need to display literal markup, escape it using character references: </div>. Also ensure custom element names follow the hyphen rule (e.g., my-widget) and that you don’t “close” void elements like br, img, or input, which must not have end tags.

HTML Examples

Reproducing the issue

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Garbage after...</</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>This paragraph has a bad closing tag.</ p>
  </body>
</html>

Fixing the issue

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Garbage after...</</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Everything is fine now.</p>
  </body>
</html>