ayg wrote:

This is deliberate. The idea is that

<small>
This is lots of text.

I expect it all to be small.
</small>

should work, so that HTML neophytes need not be troubled by block vs. inline
tags (which is very unintuitive: why *shouldn't* you be able to declare multiple
paragraphs emphasized all in one go?). It will occasionally have weird effects
like this, and more subtle ones when it comes to CSS or JavaScript (because the
nesting won't be as intended). Possibly we should disable it, if possible, but
keep in mind that this will undoubtedly break a large number of pages.

I don't think changing it would affect many pages; every time I've seen where
the intention was to change the size of text for more than one block element, it
was done via CSS (often in a template).

Even if it's the case, it would be better to explicitly do the closing/reopening
in the parser, instead of letting tidy do the work, since with tidy there's a
greater chance of it spilling (sometimes even into the interface).

Remex is doing similar with the page ID in question (replicating the small tag over and over, but outside of block tags), though it no longer closes the tag after finding a /small.

For my edification, where in the spec does it say to replicate the unclosed tag? It's a bit giggleworthy if that's what is supposed to pop out. :)

In T11661#4508445, @Izno wrote:

For my edification, where in the spec does it say to replicate the unclosed tag? It's a bit giggleworthy if that's what is supposed to pop out. :)

This applies to formatting tags .. and the relevant section of the spec is the adoption agency algorithm of the tree builder .. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/parsing.html#adoption-agency-algorithm

Works for me!