Introduction:
HTML spans are used to group elements within a document. Traditionally, they are opened using the tag and closed using . However, a question arises: can spans be closed using instead? The answer lies in understanding the role of document types.
Self-Closing Tags in XHTML:
When using XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language), a strict version of HTML that conforms to XML rules, self-closing tags are widely supported by major browsers. This means that is a valid way to close a span element in XHTML.
To illustrate, consider the following valid XHTML example:
<code class="html"><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> <h2>Will test page</h2> <p>some stuff <span class="drop" /></p> </body> </html></code>
Invalidity in HTML:
In contrast, when using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is more lenient than XHTML, self-closing tags are not universally valid. While browsers may interpret some self-closing tags correctly, such as
and
Consider the following invalid HTML example:
<code class="html"><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title></title> </head> <body> <h2>Will test page</h2> <p>some stuff <span class="drop" /></p> </body> </html></code>
Additional Considerations:
It's important to note that browsers will interpret all self-closing tags correctly only if the MIME type of the document is text/xml or application/xhtml xml. For pages served as text/html, which is the vast majority, only certain tags can be self-closed.
Helpful References:
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