The following were gathered from a discussion on a listserv for Web developers. The question was, "What are the most common HTML mistakes?"
Closure
Not closing <font> tags
Not closing <table>, <tr>, and <td> tags
<head>
Lack of doctype or possibly worse, use of doctype that doesn't validate
Lack of meta tags, particularly 'no-cache' on dynamic sites
Not giving your page a relevant title
Images
Not putting height and width attributes in image tags
Not filling in the alt tag
Linking
Local file references <img src='c:/mystuff/me.jpg'>
Forgetting the protocol on an external link <a href='www.foo.bar'>
Confusing relative and absolute paths
Tables
Table abuse (too much nesting or too many col/rowspans)
<td valign='center'> instead of the proper <td valign='middle'>
Spacing before a </td>
Forgetting to set all table attributes to zero when going for a seamless grid
Standards
Improperly nesting tags? Like <i><b>text</i></b>
Use of deprecated tags (font, center, etc.)
CAPITALIZING HTML TAGS
Not using "" for *all* attributes
Dropping a quote from an attribute this='that
Phantom attributes' generated by WYSIWYGs, attributes on things that don't exist: <B></B><I></I>
Annoyances
Not testing the page out on more than one browser, or not testing the page on more than one platform
Forgetting to set your body color, because site creators assume users have their background color set to white
No option to skip self indulgent Flash intro or splash pages
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