Why is an HTML element rather than an HTML entity?

Question

Why indeed? Wouldn\'t something like &br; be more appropriate?

Answer 1

Yes. An HTML entity would be more appropriate, as a break tag cannot contain text and behaves much like a newline.

That's just not the way things are, though. Too late. I can't tell you the number of non-XML-compatible HTML documents I've had to deal with because of unclosed break tags...