CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Vivendi
Vivendi

Reputation: 21007

Is it okay not to close HTML tags like <img> with />?

I always learned to close HTML tags like img, meta etc. like this:

<img src="..." />
<meta charset="..." />
<hr />
<br />
<input type="..." />

But I've seen numerous sites that don't put the /> at the end. They simply put > at the end. Which results in:

<img src="...">
<meta charset="...">
<hr>
<br>
<input type="...">

But to me that doesn't seem right... How can a browser know if a tag still needs to be closed somewhere when you do it like that? That's also how I learned it years ago.

But even Twitter Bootstrap is closing input tags without /> at the end.

Is this really valid HTML? And is it now a preferred way of doing it?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 219

Answers (2)

Quentin
Quentin

Reputation: 943561

<foo /> is XML syntax. It is meaningful only in XML (including XHTML).

However, let us deal with HTML.

How can a browser know if a tag still needs to be closed somewhere when you do it like that?

Some elements have required end tags. These must have an explicit </foo>

Some elements cannot have any child nodes and must not have an explicit </foo>. For example <img>.

Some elements have optional end tags (such as <p>). Browsers will close these elements when either they encounter an explicit end tag (</p>) they they encounter the start tag for an element that is not allowed as a child node inside that element (such as a <div> inside a <p> or a <li> inside another <li>).

Browsers know which elements have required, optional or forbidden end tags because they are programmed to recognise HTML.

HTML 5 allows the /> syntax on elements either forbidden end tags, but that is just syntactic sugar for people addicted to XML.

Upvotes: 5

no92
no92

Reputation: 129

This is valid in HTML5, but not in XHTML. I personally prefer using this, just because is saves some bytes.

Upvotes: 0

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