I was just testing this and in both IE8 & Chrome I see the same thing, empty (styled) divs are rendered differently depending which way you do it. It annoys me because the former seems so much neater.
Why?
EDIT: thanks for the clarifications on XHTML Vs HTML. Currently I have this:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />
<title>Test</title>
What is a better choice? I’d prefer XHTML as I believe it’s a bit nicer.
In XHTML (served with
Content-Typeofapplication/xhtml+xml),<div />would indeed work. But in HTML mode (text/html), then no; HTML is not XML, and XML empty tag syntax is not recognised.