W3C recommends putting a space before the closing tag in XHTML, because this would give a better backwards compability with some browsers, e.g. write <br />
instead of <br/>
. But are there still browsers out there, that would not tolerate that you omitted the space? (W3C do not mention which browsers cause problems.)
I know it doesn't make much of a diffence. I just prefer the shorter version. So unless there is a good reason I will now start coding my XHTML without spaces before closing empty tags.