Is it still necessary to put a space before closing an empty element in XHTML?

Question

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


Answer 1

The point of backward compatibility is to still support the browsers that do NOT support the short notation. There's probably still a lot of those out there.

I guess your choice might depend on the target audience of the website (e.g. a tech site will have more visitors using a recent browser, as opposed to seniors.net, visited by people using Win 95 and IE 4).