Is this legal HTML?

Joseph Wang <joe@athena.mit.edu>
Message-id: <9303282041.AA06069@theodore-sturgeon>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Is this legal HTML?
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 93 15:41:33 EST
From: Joseph Wang <joe@athena.mit.edu>
Is it legal HTML to start an internal anchor without a closing </A>?
For example, <A NAME="foo"> without a </A>

The trouble with doing this is that the hypertext browser has no way of
knowing whether to highlight the text behind the starting anchor or not.