Head First HTML with CSS

empty elements have no closing tag
100 Chapter 3
In Chapter 1 we said that
an element is an opening tag +
content + closing tag. So how is
an element? It doesn’t have
any content, and it doesn’t even
have a closing tag.
Exactly, it doesn’t have any content.
The element is an element that doesn’t have any content. Why? Because it’s just
meant to be a linebreak, nothing else. So, when an element doesn’t have any real content
by design, we just use a shorthand to represent the element and it ends up looking like
. After all, if we didn’t have this shorthand, you’d be writing every
time you needed a linebreak, and how much sense does that make?
isn’t the only element like this; there are others, and we have a name for them:
empty elements. In fact, we’ve already seen another empty element, the element.
We’ll be coming back to look at the element in detail in a couple chapters.
Keep in mind, the reason for the shorthand isn’t laziness so much as it is efficiency. It’s
more efficient to represent empty elements this way (efficient in typing, in the number
of characters that end up in a page, and so on). In fact, after reading HTML for a while,
you’ll find that it is easier on your eyes too.
Here’s the opening tag.
Content? Hmm, the whole point of
this element is to insert a linebreak.
There’s really no content.
I’m half the
element I used to
be... (sniff sniff).
Here’s the closing tag.
Okay, typing this in is REALLY silly.
We know there’s never going to be any
content between those tags.
Yeah, if we just type this
then it really represents
the same thing.