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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T20:10:40+00:00

Twitter seems to be using an <i/> tag to display their icons from a

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Twitter seems to be using an <i/> tag to display their icons from a css sprite. Did they just make up that tag, or is HTML I’ve never heard of?

Brilliant idea at any rate 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    That’s the regular italics tag, but without any contents; i.e. it’s semantically equivalent to <i></i>.†

    In XML, empty elements are written with an extra slash at the end. XHTML is valid XML. So <i/> is fine. For a more common example, think of e.g. <br />.

    To see for yourself that <i/> is a valid XHTML tag, check the XML EmptyElemTag definition or pass the following to the W3C validator:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <title></title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p><i/></p> <!-- look here -->
  </body>
</html>

      † As Toji correctly points out, the syntactic difference is relevant under certain circumstances. Though browsers may not treat <i/> any different from <i></i>, other XML parsers could!

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