swiftcoder 16 hours ago

Worse, due to the aforementioned permissive error handling in HTML parsers, a closing </br> tag will end up inserting a second line break

hnlmorg 15 hours ago

You close them in the same tag:

    <br/>
  • pornel 15 hours ago

    This syntax is ignored in HTML. The / is thrown away and has no effect.

    This non-closing talisman means that <div/> or <script/> are not closed, and will mess up nesting of elements.

    • hnlmorg 15 hours ago

      In HTML, yes. But I thought the OP was talking about XHTML?

imiric 16 hours ago

Wrong.[1]

> if the element is one of the void elements, or if the element is a foreign element, then there may be a single U+002F SOLIDUS character (/)

If you're going to be pedantic, at least be correct about it.

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#start-tag...

  • eddyg 14 hours ago

    You left out the rest of the spec:

    > On void elements, it does not mark the start tag as self-closing but instead is unnecessary and has no effect of any kind. For such void elements, it should be used only with caution — especially since, if directly preceded by an unquoted attribute value, it becomes part of the attribute value rather than being discarded by the parser.

    (The void elements are listed here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Void_eleme... )

    • imiric 14 hours ago

      All of that is a far cry from elements not being allowed to be closed. Please point to where the spec mentions that. MDN is not the spec.

  • swiftcoder 15 hours ago

    There can't however be a separate closing tag, which is a reasonable interpretation of the post you are replying to