<br> vs. <br />

I've seen both ways

[seashell]

I've seen <br> and <br />. Is there a reason for the / at the end?

[dmorison]

<br/> (or preferably <br />) is for use in XHTML, in which all tags have to be closed, even those that do not normally have a closing tag. /> is the shorthand for closing a tag without repeating the entire tag name; so instead of using <br></br> you just use <br />.

[seashell]

Awesome, that's kind of what I suspected.

[ukgimp]

I found out this weekend that the space is due to browser weirdness, forget which one but one of them throws an error. So best to use it.

Cheers

[jetboy_70]

"I found out this weekend that the space is due to browser weirdness, forget which one"

That's because you could barely stand ;) Netscape 4.

[DaveN]

Ukgimp I think it was to do with Mac's could be wrong.

DaveN

[g1smd]

Leave the / out if you are writing HTML code. You get some very wierd validation errors if you put an ending / in the code in HTML.

You must put it in, only in XHTML.

[korkus2000]

Another common one is the image tag:

<img src="gif.gif" />

[D_Blackwell]

I validate 4.01 Strict with <br /> and <img /> but <hr /> won't validate. I have to stick with <hr>. Can anyone tell me why? Is <hr> an orange in an apple barrel?

[jetboy_70]

<hr /> / <hr/> is certainly a valid XHTML tag. Possibly a bug in the validator, or more likely something close to the tag in your code causing it to misreport. Can you post a section of code and the validator output?

[g1smd]

While it is valid XHTML, he said that he is using HTML 4 Strict.

I would remove all of the "XHTML-style" code if you are using HTML 4.

[jetboy_70]

Which you mentioned earlier as well. Too much typing and not enough reading on my part - well spotted. Of course D_Blackwell could always validate to XHTML 1.0 Transitional instead, which would be a step forward, standards-wise.

[D_Blackwell]

It hasn't been all that long that I've been validating at all! Started with 4.0 loose or transitional and had scads of errors. (Although mostly similar errors repeated many many times.)

Dipped my toe into strict one day to see what would happen. I found that it wasn't that big a jump at all and switched almost immediately.

I really know very little about xhtml. How big a jump would this be? What are the most obvious considerations to watch out for? Validation has raised the standard of my work immensely and made further progress much easier.

Downside? Tansitional to start? Or whole hog to strict?

[jetboy_70]

Stick with transitional if you're after some degree of compatibility with older browers like Netscape 4. I'd start with reading the W3C spec at [w3.org...] and then validating your document to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Fix the errors ... there's your XHTML! It may be a little simplistic but that's how I started, and if you're already producing valid HTML you won't have that much to change.

The code you produce might validate, but to code in the 'spirit' of XHTML you should be taking full advantage of CSS. That's for another post though ...

[keyplyr]

This thread HTML vs. XHTML [webmasterworld.com] covers it nicely.

[D_Blackwell]

Thanks keyplyr,

An interesting thread. For now, I think I'll be content with things as they are. Except for those 'tag every line' references, I'm already doing almost everything that I saw mentioned anyway. It seems that the code I am using will be solid for a long time. I don't want to get ridiculous with standards and compliance. There's too much else to do.