Is it Possible to Close HTML Spans Using ``?
Can HTML Spans Be Closed Using ?
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
, others, including , are not supported.
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:
- [W3C Validator](https://validator.w3.org/)
- [XHTML vs HTML](https://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-xhtml1-20020801/xhtml.html#xhtml-vs-html)
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