I am writing an HTML page and noticed that the HTML header tags are not exactly consistent. Some of them require closing tags and some do not.
For example, script tag does require a closing tag but meta does not. Now I wonder why?
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I believe it is just an arbitrary reason having to do with the system which the current system was built on…
“In case anyone’s curious, the ultimate reason is that HTML was originally a dialect of SGML, which is XML’s weird older brother. In SGML-land, tags can be specified in the DTD as either self-closing (e.g. BR, HR, INPUT), implicitly closeable (e.g. P, LI, TD), or explicitly closeable (e.g. TABLE, DIV, SCRIPT). XML of course has no concept of this.”
from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3327807/773263