Can I petition that the closing tags not being rendered also be fixed before 5.1? Not only did it cause invalid html, but also it actually affected the rendering (or at least the browser's attempt to compensate did) of visual layout (I had div's that were wrapped inside of the unclosed anchor above it at least in Safari!).
Further, I saw some crazy errors also associated with it: RequestExceptionHandler Processing of request failed with uncaught exception: Request event 'gotoPage' (on component Playlist:table) was not handled; you must provide a matching event handler method in the component or in one of its containers. When the Handler WAS defined, in the table component. (it worked flawlessly before the upgrade and flawlessly after change all empty anchor's to have an empty span inside them) (I use $('gotolinkid'); to get the url of the link to update it with ajax) and the unmatched tags must have screwed that up too. It also affected empty <h1></h1>'s etc... I think this is a big regression that will give people a bad impression in a stable release. My $.02... Steve