Space Before Closing Slash?

Question

I\'ve frequently seen a space preceding the closing slash in XML and HTML tags. The XHTML line break is probably the canonical example:

<         


        

Answer 1

Supporting bobince's answer with screenshot of Netscape 4.80 showing documents

data:text/html,foo
bar

(top left, linebreak rendered) and

data:text/html,foo
bar

(bottom left, linebreak ignored).

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Posting as answer to show the picture

Tangentially related: in fact I had a lengthy answer identifying the cause of such misbehaviour of ancient browsers (and resulting recommendation to include space) in misunderstood SGML specs, namely SGML Null End Tag (NET) (where 1 equals 123 so 12 would actually mean 1>2), but not only I was unable to find good proof and concrete version of standard, I wasn't even able to grasp proper standard-complying behaviour. So few raw links for reference:

• w3c validator notice mentioning problematic closing slash and pointing to
• Empty elements in SGML, HTML, XML, and XHTML @ www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
• Beware of XHTML: Null End Tags (NET) stating, that

  However, there are still some smaller user agents that properly support Null End Tags. One of the more well-known user agents that support it is the W3C validator.

(Unable to reproduce there now, but supports Lee Kowalkowski's statement about multiple browsers affected by this.)

• XML W3C Working Draft 07-Aug-97 - latest specs draft that includes reference of Null End Tag in DTD snippet: NET "/>"