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Asked: 2026-05-15T17:14:03+00:00

I mean, aren’t <div/> and <div></div> supposed to be exactly the same thing? By

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I mean, aren’t <div/> and <div></div> supposed to be exactly the same thing?

By browser I mean the latest Firefox and Internet Explorer. And by go crazy I mean ignore styles of tags that contain the <div/>.

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  1. Editorial Team

    aren’t <div/> and <div></div> supposed to be exactly the same thing?

    Only in XML. Are you serving your web page as XML (application/xhtml+xml)? If so you can use either, but you’d be sacrificing compatibility with IE versions before IE9.

    If like most people you are serving an XHTML page as text/html, you must abide by the compatibility guidelines, one of which is that you must only use self-closing tags for elements that have an EMPTY content model, ie. the ones where in HTML you’d use a single tag with no close-tag (<img> et al).

    Otherwise, you’ve just written what non-XML HTML parsers will see as a start-tag with no end-tag, which is likely to mess the page’s nesting up. <div/> will put the whole of the rest of the page inside that div.

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