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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T13:29:50+00:00

I was testing this, since I understood using XHTML let me use any valid

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I was testing this, since I understood using XHTML let me use any valid XML for empty <div> elements:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<title>Test</title>
</head>

<body>
<div style="border:solid 10px black; width:100px; height:100px"></div>
<div style="border:solid 10px red; width:100px; height:100px"></div>
<div style="border:solid 10px blue; width:100px; height:100px"></div>

<div style="border:solid 10px black; width:100px; height:100px" />
<div style="border:solid 10px red; width:100px; height:100px" />
<div style="border:solid 10px blue; width:100px; height:100px" />
</body>
</html>

It doesn’t work in any browser I try… this is how FireBug tells me it understands the document:

<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="border: 10px solid black; width: 100px; height: 100px;"/>
<div style="border: 10px solid red; width: 100px; height: 100px;"/>
<div style="border: 10px solid blue; width: 100px; height: 100px;"/>
<div style="border: 10px solid black; width: 100px; height: 100px;">
 <div style="border: 10px solid red; width: 100px; height: 100px;">
  <div style="border: 10px solid blue; width: 100px; height: 100px;"/>
 </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

I’m a bit confused what the point is of using XHTML if I have to do this, I might as well just use HTML?

Note, that setting the content type to content=”application/xhtml+xml” makes no difference in FF3 at least.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    To answer the question, the XHTML specification only allows ten different tags to have empty elements. As far as I know, the reason for this is to mostly be HTML compatible.

    For the sake of documentation, the valid tags are (from here):

    • <base />
    • <meta />
    • <link />
    • <hr />
    • <br />
    • <img />
    • <area />
    • <input />
    • <col />

    But your code isn’t actually be interpreted as XML anyway, you have a Content-Type: text/html. That tells the browser to interpret your code as normal HTML. To tell the browser to interpret your XHTML as XML you must send the content as application/xhtml+xml instead. There are other problems with this, though.

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