No, he's right. Allow me to quote from W3C's XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition) specification, to be precise, section 4.6. Empty Elements:
Empty elements must either have an end tag or the start tag must end with />. For instance, <br/> or <hr></hr>. See HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ways to ensure this is backward compatible with HTML 4 user agents.
Now, it's true that in the same document, one of the appendices, C.2. Empty Elements recommends using <br />, but that's just a recommendation, empty elements with a open and end tag are allowed.

In reply to Re^6: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by JavaFan
in thread Wiki-Style syntax for posting by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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