I won't speak to the jQuery documentation, nor jQuery's internal implementation for $(html), only your questions about HTML and XHTML, based on my own knowledge and best practices:
*Non-void elements (sometimes called non-empty elements, meaning they can contain text and child nodes)* For an empty span element on its own, neither <span/> nor <span> is technically valid HTML or XHTML, unless you rely on the html parser to auto-close the element. And the rules for doing that depend on the element, what follows it, and which html parser is being used (ie, which browser). As a best practice, I, and the jQuery UI project by convention, always use <span></span> as a valid and consistent way to open and close a non-void but initially empty element. Because many elements have an optional closing tag in html, according to how browser html parsers behave, many people continue to use <span> or <span/> and they may never have any problems in any browsers with that, though the latter is merely an XML-compatible version of the former, not technically valid XHTML as span is a non-void element. In the case of that (X)HTML being parsed as html, which is most common, the browser will ignore the slash inside the opening tag (as if you had specified <span>) and when it self closes, it will be as if you had specified <span></span> *Void elements (sometimes called empty elements, meaning they cannot contain text or child nodes)* Void elements never have a closing tag, and don't require a closing slash in the tag in HTML, but allow it for compatability with XHTML, which does require it. See http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Should_I_close_empty_elements_with_.2F.3E_or_.3E.3F This is a relatively short list of elements (this one from http://www.elharo.com/blog/software-development/web-development/2007/01/29/all-empty-tags-in-html/#comment-227448 ): area base basefont br col frame hr img input isindex link meta param the most common ones being img and input. Note it does not include some very commonly created elements such as a div li ol span table td th tr ul - Richard On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Bertilo Wennergren <berti...@gmail.com>wrote: > > According to the jQuery documentation we're > supposed to write like this: > > $("<span/>") > > and not like this: > > $("<span>") > > http://docs.jquery.com/Core/jQuery#htmlownerDocument > > That means using XHTML style code for the > elements created. > > Are we supposed to do that even when we are using > HTML style code (e.g. HTML 4.01)? > > E.g.: > > $('#whatever').html('<img alt="" src="..." />'); > > That would seem a bit bizarre if the actual HTML > page has lots of '<img alt="" src="">' without the > ending slash. > > It does seem that "img", "br" etc. work without the > ending slash as well. > > -- > Bertilo Wennergren <http://bertilow.com> >
