if you tried to use <br/> in HTML then it would mean the same as <br/>> (or a line break followed by a greater than symbol)
Are you sure? I tried <br/> in a small HTML-file and had it validated by the "official" W3C-validator at http://validator.w3.org.
The uploaded file was tentatively found to be Valid. That means it would validate as HTML 4.01 Strict if you updated the source document to match the options used (typically this message indicates that you used either the Document Type override or the Character Encoding override). Source Listing Below is the source input I used for this validation: 
1: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
2: <html>
3: <head><title>TITLE</title></head>
4: <body><p>TEST<br/>TEST</p></body>
5: </html>

[download]
I don't think you can "escape" characters with special meaning in (X)HTML by using a slash. You must use entities for that.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to Re^5: Keep quotes around numerical attributes after parsing with HTML::Treebuilder? by CountZero
in thread Keep quotes around numerical attributes after parsing with HTML::Treebuilder? by tphyahoo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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