>>I'm sorry but I disagree with you. It's not an HTML tag but just a text that happen to include the less than and greater than sign. There's no reason to treat is as HTML tag.
>
>How can you determine if it is or not? This is where the issue is. There is nothing to rely on but to maintain a table of all the HTML tags and that can change at any time.

There's no HTML tag that starts with a space.