Crash IE6: With HTML!

Any serious client-side web developer has managed to crash a browser with some string of complex JavaScript, XSLT transform, or ActiveX Object. But what about with just some good old HTML?! Certainly a sixth-generation browser with several years on the market, such as Internet Explorer 6 could not be brought to its knees with some simple HTML. Well, guess again.

Ponder the HTML below and see if you can guess what evil it possesses:

<div>
<div><a name="input1"/><input name="input1"/></div>
<div><a name="input2"/><input name="input2"/></div>
</div>


I mean that looks perfectly safe and sane to me. Well, not to IE6. See, IE6 does not like self-closing anchor tags. But, instead of dropping the tag from the DOM, or adding an immediate </a> to correct the problem, it must do something completely different, because IE6 will crash when it stumbles upon this code.

I spent an hour of trial and error, searching for the culprit, before I isolated this code on one the web pages I was building. Not even for a split second did I suspect that it would be a bit of HTML causing IE6 to stop dead in the water.