Comment by JimDabell

> The <br /> or <br/> spelling was added to HTML after XHTML had already basically lost

This is untrue. This is the first public draft of XHTML from 1998:

> Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements, e.g. <br />, <hr /> and <img src="karen.jpg" alt="Karen" />.

— https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-html-in-xml-19981205/#guidelin...