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HTML Guide

Trailing slash on void elements has no effect and interacts badly with unquoted attribute values.

Void elements, like area, base, br, col, embed, hr, img, input, link, meta, source, track, and wbr are self-closing and don’t need a trailing slash /, which should be avoided as that can interfere with unquoted attribute values.

These void elements can optionally have a trailing slash and some people prefer to include it as it may look clearer. Some HTML formatters integrated in code editors automatically add a trailing slash to void elements.

So for example, both <hr> and <hr/> are valid self-closing void elements. However, when combined with unquoted values for attributes, the trailing slash can be problematic.

In this example, the img element takes http://example.com/logo.svg as the value its src attribute.

<img alt=SVG src=http://example.com/logo.svg>

But in the following example with a trailing slash, the img element takes http://example.com/logo.svg/ as the value its src attribute. That is, the trailing slash has been parsed as part of the value for the src attribute, which breaks the display of the image.

<img alt=SVG src=http://example.com/logo.svg/>

In short, this HTML warning makes you aware of this problem. When possible, it’s recommended to avoid trailing slashes in void elements.

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