Don’t use /> in HTML 🚫!
I always thought I needed to close HTML tags properly, even for tags like <br/>🏷️.
It was in the hype around 2000s when the idea was that XHTML was the future. I was one of the first to pick this up and try to make my web pages validate as XML🌐.
My blog was at that time, but it needed to be monitored closely because one mal typed character could fail the parsing💻.
Then for me and many others the realization came that the World Wide Web was so great, because HTML parsers were so permissive💡.
Being strict would have killed the Web!
From that time, I picked up on the habit of closing HTML tags, like <br/>. This is required in XHTML but it isn’t for HTML📝.
This week I read the article by Jake Archibald: ‘The case against self-closing tags in HTML’ https://jakearchibald.com/2023/against-self-closing-tags-in-html/ 📰
It made me realize that I had been doing it wrong all those years💭.
<br> is the correct way✅!
Even an old-timer like me can update their mental software! 😄🧠