why and not ?

Question

This is one of those things that you read once, say \"aha!\" and then forget. Exactly my case.

Why is the line-break tag in xhtml preferentially written with a space

Answer 1

w3c specifies this as the grammar:

EmptyElemTag       ::=      '<' Name (S Attribute)* S? '/>'

That means open bracket, a name, a number of (space and attribute) tokens, an optional space, a slash, and an end tag. According to this, both are correct.