What do you call tags that need no ending tag?

Question

There are HTML tags, such as , and , that need no ending tag (,

Answer 1

This sort of Element is an empty element (since it does not contain anything, it just may have attributes). That's the correct way according to the specification, AFAIK. (If the Element is not empty, the Element consists of the opening tag, the closing tag, and the content inbetween.)

Those tags are also called "unpaired", "single", or "bachelor tags". The term "self-closing" I don't like because they don't close themselves any more than other tags, it's still you or your program that puts the "/>" in there.