<br/> and any other tag with no space before the / passes validation just fine, and displays just fine in every browser I've ever tried. Try it on http://validator.w3.org/. The space is not needed.

Just to throw fuel on the fire: Google Adsense (the web's biggest evil) uses "document.write()", which is deprecated in XHTML. So all you folks using Adsense are causing your pages to be invalid XHTML.

The /> is not a must, at the moment, as all things must be backward compatible. But as time goes on the standards will change so it is a good idea, and good housekeeping, to start using the /> now.

One error I have noticed on some of the major car manufacturers sites is not closing the <li> tag after each use. That is a basic requirement. At the moment it is not a problem as most browsers can deal with it, but the time will come when the page appearance will be affected.

Bob

The standard HAS changed. If you're using the XHTML Transitional docytpe, which vBulletin does, then the standard is "<br />".

I still don't see the point. The space is just annoying.

The point is it's part of the standard. I'm not saying I like it either; but that's how it's done in xhtm, since it's based much more closely on XML, and XML requires that every tag be closed. If a tag has no ending tag, it must close "itself", and that's done by space-slash-closed angle bracket.

I understand. I have no issue with the slash-closed angle bracket. It's the pointless space before it I'm not happy with.

It's like those people who code with all those extra spaces that aren't necessary and just annoy me. e.g.

if ( $a == $b ) {
my_function ( a, b );
}

Ewwwww!

Its there for clean presentation and validation markup, there should be a space between any attributes and next attribute.

If you say so.

I do.

<img src=""/> will confuses most parsers as src=""/ would be treated as one element of the tag.