why <br /> and not <br/>?

user_78374 0
Viewed 13007

This is one of those things that you read once, say "aha!" and then forget. Exactly my case.

Why is the line-break tag in xhtml preferentially written with a space <br /> and not in the also ok format <br/> ? I remember the reason was interesting, and as you can imagine it's not easy to find with google.

For sure it's not an issue of xml well-formedness. From W3C

[44]    EmptyElemTag       ::=      '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '/>' 

   Empty-element tags may be used for any element which has no content, whether
   or not it is declared using the keyword EMPTY. For interoperability, the 
   empty-element tag should be used, and should only be used, for elements which 
   are declared EMPTY.

Examples of empty elements:

<IMG align="left"  src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/WWW/w3c_home" /> 
<br></br> 
<br/>

So the space at the end is optional.

xhtml tags
13 Answers

w3c specifies this as the grammar:

EmptyElemTag       ::=      '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '/>'

That means open bracket, a name, a number of (space and attribute) tokens, an optional space, a slash, and an end tag. According to this, both are correct.

Matt_531390

Some older browsers didn't parse the element correctly without the space, so most web developers use <br />. I don't remember which browsers offhand, but I believe they're just about extinct.

EDIT: The browser was Netscape 4.

user_343970

There is no right way in XHTML. They are formally identical in XML. Whitespace is not significant in that location.

user_1314330

For XHTML: both of them. For HTML4 and earlier: neither.

user_29880

Both <br/> and <br /> are correct. The reason that <br /> came about in the first place was to support older browsers that didn't understand the new <br/> syntax. It's really kind of a hack where the / is interpreted as an attribute with no value and ignored.

user_1663390

Both are correct, and both will be accepted by web browsers. You may as well save yourself the extra character, and use <br/>

user_916710

Both are correct. But I would use <br /> just to keep my code consistent... because I would never write

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/>

instead of

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

just to save a byte... and the second version is imho better readable. But that's just a matter of taste. Do it as you like, but do it consistent :-)

user_2275320

Either will work just fine. Assuming you are asking for evangelical reasons, I prefer <br/>

user_132630

Both are correct.

user_2078470

<br>. You aren't using XML anyway.

user_334660
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