Unfortunately, the closing slash is not valid in html 4 on several
elements. Someone
posted a plugin a week or two ago to suppress closing slashes. However,
it would seem more
practical to use the xhtml 1.0 transitional doctype, which allows the
closing slashes (in
fact it enforces xml-valid markup) but is more forgiving about other old
html elements
that you may be using.
Note that there is some controversey about this because the w3c
recommends sending xthml
with an application/xml-xhtml mime type. However, as some people have
argued, all modern
browsers will do the right thing with the xhtml 1.0 doc type and the
text/html mime type.
(And I’m taking up a collection to have the entire IE dev team killed…
care to contribute?)
b
PS: here’s an article about doctypes:
and here’s an explanation of how browsers use them: