Quick question about self closing tags.

[Schmoopy]

Ok, this should be relatively straight forward, but I was under the impression that self closing tags were either ended like this: <br>, or <br/> (depending on doctype) but I keep coming across: <br /> with a space before the slash, is there any particular reason for this?

Or is it just a way to make it more legible, it just seems rather arbitrary to me. I've only come across it since learning PHP, so is it specific to that, or what?

Any help appreciated,

Jack.

[rangana]

It is needed for compatability with old browsers and to separate it from the last attribute's value (incase there are attributes).

For further reading:
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/...tml/index.html
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/forums/s...ead.php?t=7934

Hope that helps.

[Schmoopy]

Oh I see, thanks for that

[Twey]

<foo /> is XML (and thus XHTML), and is equivalent to <foo></foo>. SGML (and thus HTML) is smarter, and allows definitions of empty tags in the DTD, such that this isn't necessary and an empty tag is considered to be closed as soon as it's opened; thus, <foo> is perfectly valid. <foo />, on the other hand, is equivalent to <foo>&lt; in SGML-compliant parsers, one of the reasons that XHTML cannot be safely served as text/html.

[Snookerman]

I've seen some codes that have self closing div tags: <div />, usually with an id value. Is that really valid and what is the difference?

[Twey]

Yes, it is entirely valid. As I said above, <div /> is, in XML/XHTML, entirely equivalent to <div></div>.

[Snookerman]

Ok, so can any content be added to this container or does that have to made through css?

[Twey]

It's exactly equivalent to <div></div>. You can do anything to it that you can do with any other empty <div>.

[Snookerman]

Could this be done with other tags that are usually empty? E.g. <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.2.6.min.js" />
Would that work?

[rangana]

Could this be done with other tags that are usually empty? E.g. <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.2.6.min.js" />
Would that work?

Doing so will work on FF, but will break on IE (I've encountered that).

You might find this thread useful too:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/html/3614746.htm