Using <br> instead of <br />

Question

When I started learning HTML from w3schools, they were using this <br />. As I started learning ASP.NET, on their forum (ASP.NET Forums) I was told to use <br>. So I started using the second one.

My Question: What is the difference between <br> and <br />? Is there something like browser support?

Answer 1

A lone <br> is invalid in XHTML, since XML documents must close each tag they open. <br /> is semantically the same as <br></br> in XML documents, and is referred to as a self-closing tag, so <br /> is used when writing XHTML, or HTML documents that will be read by an XML parser.

This applies to all other tags that do not have a closing tag in HTML, such as <hr /> and <meta />.

Both are valid HTML, so there is no reason not to use <br />, unless you are writing for a broken HTML parser.

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Note that in XML, <br/> is valid. However, older HTML parsers that don't know about self-closing tags have been known to choke on this. If a space is inserted before the tag name and the self-closing tag token (/) then these parsers see / as an attribute, or as noise that is discarded. Therefore, one should always make sure to put a space between the element name and the self-closing tag token for compatibility with these broken parsers.

Answer 2

<br> is the valid way to do this in HTML, and <br/> is the way to do it in XHTML.

Answer 3

This is a duplicate, but anyways, there is no difference other than preference, at least in HTML. In XML, <br /> is more correct.