Curious about <br /> vs <br>

[heatherketten]

I haven’t done HTML regularly since the early 2000’s, when it was a little tougher to find good resources on coding “grammar”.

I remember using

<br>

for line breaks back then, but this course is using

<br />

for line breaks now.

What is the reasoning behind the formatting change? I’m curious if this affects other codes that you don’t need an ending tag for…like

<hr>

for a horizontal rule?

[fight_dragons]

<br / > is for xhtml compatibility
regular old br should work just fine
Additionally it could be argued that the xhtml version is more readable?

[mtf]

In HTML5 there is no difference, other than XML conformance which is not required when the document is served as "text/html".

As it stands now, text/html is the de facto MIME type, and therefore the default in which case, HTML 4 becomes the core specification, and valid HTML5. There are some exceptions to this, such as deprecated or obsolete tags and attributes.

<br>

is valid, as is,

<br/>

or,

<br />

The last is the specified form in XHTML, the recommendations of which HTML5 is a refinement. To be backward compatible HTML5 needed to support both HTML 4 and XHTML. It was XHTML that demanded the / in self-closing tags, not HTML 4. In fact pre-XHTML the term had not even been thought of yet. <BR> is a void element in HTML 4.

Bottom line, unless the lesson checker expects the /, it can be left out of all tags, this especially since as stated earlier, the page is served as text/html unless otherwise specified. Further reading… XML Conforming Markup Languages.