> 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.
Worse, due to the aforementioned permissive error handling in HTML parsers, a closing </br> tag will end up inserting a second line break
You close them in the same tag:
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.
In HTML, yes. But I thought the OP was talking about XHTML?
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...
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... )
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.
There can't however be a separate closing tag, which is a reasonable interpretation of the post you are replying to