Chubby cuddlebot Lemma!

I think I’m going to choose to believe that there are errors in this post, because I’d be unhappy living in a world where all this is true

Yeah, stuff like this makes me feel like no one was at the steering wheel when HTML and CSS were created or continuously updated, so convincing ourselves that Everything Is Fine™ seems like buying into the Kool-Aid

we must go back to xhtml. it's the only way

the history of it goes something like this:

• when html was created, <div /> was totally invalid syntax, and whether an element was self-closing or not depended on what the element was. hence, <br> is always self-closing and there is no </br> tag in html. this was fine at the time because html was only intended for writing simple documents without much nesting. in fact, due to the relative simplicity of html at the time and the fact that javascript and css did not exist until years after html's creation, there was generally no reason to even parse html into a tree. <b> would turn on bold, </b> would turn off bold, etc.
• later, xml was created, where <foo /> meant a self-closing foo element, and no elements were specially handled
• the w3c decided xml was the future and created xhtml, which was a way to write web documents in xml. because it was xml, <br> would no longer work, and you instead had to write <br />
• a lot of people who didn't really understand the finer points of this beyond "xhtml is the future now" and "now you write <br /> for some reason" made a bunch of web pages that they thought were xhtml but were actually being parsed as html because they were served with the wrong mime type
• the only reason html parsers didn't choke on this pseudo-xhtml is because they were actually parsing the / as an attribute name. hence, / did not actually close the tag
• later, html5 came about, which was largely an effort to nail down and specify how browsers actually parse html, since up to this point it was a huge disgusting mess where browsers were basically forced to reverse-engineer each other to figure out how they handled different errors
• making / self-closing in html, when up to this point it was never actually valid html syntax, would break too many pages, so instead it is now just ignored

edit: just realized i'm basically just summarizing the article (thought i'd read it already but i hadn't and turns out it goes over most of the same stuff) but maybe this summary will be helpful

I do wish they’d made self closing tags valid when they explicitly added custom tags. I’m fine with it being different from the rest of HTML, I understand the compatibility issue. I wish we could do that right now.