I don't see any real issue with using a trailing slash, especially with a doctype of 4.0 transitional that tells us to expect a jumble of tag soup. Maybe we ought to move up to 1999 and use 4.01 since it supersedes 4.0.

Just for kicks, I ran the w3c validator against the front page and got 115 Errors and 199 warnings. Most of the problems were because the validator gets confused about how to parse the many trailing slashes and a few were cruft from HTML 3.2. The actual warning (NOT error) for the link tag was

The sequence <FOO /> can be interpreted in at least two different ways, depending on the DOCTYPE of the document. For HTML 4.01 Strict, the '/' terminates the tag <FOO (with an implied '>'). However, since many browsers don't interpret it this way, even in the presence of an HTML 4.01 Strict DOCTYPE, it is best to avoid it completely in pure HTML documents and reserve its use solely for those written in XHTML.
FWIW, a simple <br /> validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional as a snippet in the validator.

At one point it looked like the web was (theoretically) headed towards XHTML but now it looks more like HTML 5. The WHATWG wiki article on HTML vs. XHTML says

Void elements only have a start tag; end tags must not be specified for void elements, and it is impossible for them to contain any content. A trailing slash may optionally be inserted at the end of the element's tag, immediately before the closing greater-than sign.
Either way, the trailing slash will probably be at least optional.

I do feel your pain though as I'm also quite pedantic about the HTML I generate.

In reply to Re: For valid HTML by rowdog
in thread For valid HTML by Lady_Aleena

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