Bart Busschots is back with episode 2 of his Programming By Stealth series. He’ll take us on our first baby step towards programming by explaining how the Hyper-Text Markup Language works, better known to us all as HTML. HTML is not a true programming language, it is instead a simpler beast known as a markup language – it adds context to text.
Bart’s companion tutorial can be found on his website at pbs.bartificer.net/….
The reason for the space in a self-closing tag is because, for a time, some browsers would trip over a tag that didn’t have it. I guess it was something to do with a space being used to denote the end of the tag name. Now I’ll use [ ] here instead of so it won’t get interpreted by the comment box. If you consider [a href=”blah”] or [img src=” “] you will notice that “from the opening bracket up to the first space” is the tag name. This still holds true for [hr /] but not for [hr/] where the browser might interpret “hr/” as the (invalid) tag name. Given such tags are implicitly self closing, the browser would ignore the final / and simply render the tag it had correctly identified. This is all from memory, but I think the relevant HTML specification allowed for inclusion of the space or not and because of these older browsers, the space was always included and stayed that way because, as Bart pointed out, it is visually more effective in showing the self close.