Is it ok to use tags without parent tags?
i.e.
some copy
or must it be..
No, that would definitely be invalid (X)HTML. I mean, you could, and the browser might render it correctly if you're lucky (IE in particular, as it tends to be especially lenient), but there's far from any guarantee. You should always enclose tags with either (unordered list) or (ordered list). Why wouldn't you want to anyway?