Is it still necessary to put a space before closing an empty element in XHTML?

Question

W3C recommends putting a space before the closing tag in XHTML, because this would give a better backwards compability with some browsers, e.g. write <br /> instead of <br/>. But are there still browsers out there, that would not tolerate that you omitted the space? (W3C do not mention which browsers cause problems.)

I know it doesn't make much of a diffence. I just prefer the shorter version. So unless there is a good reason I will now start coding my XHTML without spaces before closing empty tags.

What source implies that it ever was? Can you provide a link? — Tomalak, Nov 20 '08 at 14:30
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/462741/space-before-closing-slash — gavenkoa, Nov 06 '12 at 08:23

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 20 '08 at 14:36

9

It's for Netscape 4.

I still include it out of habit, and my templating library will put them in for me anyway, but it's questionable whether it's really that important today.

answered Nov 20 '08 at 14:36

bobince

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Technically, this isn't correct. I just tested Netscape Navigator 4.08 and it handles this just fine. Netscape 3.0, however, does not. If you're going to care about either of those, though, you'll have rather a few more pressing problems to worry about. – mercator Jul 09 '09 at 22:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 20 '08 at 17:42

I would say no... It was to support Netscape 4, as bobince said, and I believe the number of such browsers being really in use is very near zero, fortunately!
Unlike what Vincent said, I don't think IE4 has such issue. And I believe we can class IE3/4/5/5.5 as dead anyway (at least gone of Web statistics), and waiting impatiently to do the same for IE6 too! :-D

Silly thing, this has influenced so many people that sometime I see x="foo" /> even pure XML files!

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 20 '08 at 14:30

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If there are still browsers that rely on the space use it.

The amount of bytes saved does not justify the possible problems.

answered Nov 20 '08 at 14:30

Toon Krijthe

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 20 '08 at 14:34

The point of backward compatibility is to still support the browsers that do NOT support the short notation. There's probably still a lot of those out there.

I guess your choice might depend on the target audience of the website (e.g. a tech site will have more visitors using a recent browser, as opposed to seniors.net, visited by people using Win 95 and IE 4).

Is it still necessary to put a space before closing an empty element in XHTML?

4 Answers4

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