or ` in HTML of any kind. It's invalid HTML, and every browser i've ever seen treats it as equivalent to ` – cHao May 11 '11 at 08:52

BTW, w3schools sucks as a reference for stuff like this. – cHao May 11 '11 at 08:54

so what would you relate for a reference on stuff like this ? cHao ? – Naveed Butt May 11 '11 at 09:38

@Naveed Butt: By specifying the conditions when the selfclosed tag can't be used, the answer implies that it can be used in the other cases. It's like saying "if you have red shoes, you can't walk on water". – Guffa May 11 '11 at 11:01

@Naveed: http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1 – BoltClock May 11 '11 at 11:13

@Naveed: The official specs on HTML might be a good start. `` has never been valid HTML, even in HTML5 -- and it could actually spit out unwanted chars in a fully-SGML-compliant HTML parser (though fortunately, i don't know of any in common use, and HTML5 seems to finally be breaking ties with SGML anyway). – cHao May 11 '11 at 11:17

@cHao: Opera is OK with `` . I've hit this issue before when generating tag soup via XSLT. – Brian May 11 '11 at 15:28