Why don't self-closing script elements work?

Question

What is the reason browsers do not correctly recognize:

Answer 1

The people above have already pretty much explained the issue, but one thing that might make things clear is that, though people use
and such all the time in HTML documents, any / in such a position is basically ignored, and only used when trying to make something both parseable as XML and HTML. Try

foo

, for example, and you get a regular paragraph.