Question

I was just wondering whether it is acceptable to close a common tag, eg. a <span> which requires no data using the XHTML closing slash to reduce markup.

So for example:

<span id='hello'></span>

could be written as

<span id='hello' />

Answer 1

No you can’t do that, span is not self-closing tag. Here are the self closing tags:

<area />
<base />
<basefont />
<br />
<hr />
<input />
<img />
<link />
<meta />