> The point I was making is that nobody uses XHTML I don't disagree here. > The fact that the html5 spec does not permit self-closing CDATA elements The HTML

> The point I was making is that nobody uses XHTML I don't disagree here. > The fact that the html5 spec does not permit self-closing CDATA elements The HTML spec does permit self-closing <script>: in the XHTML syntax. The HTML5 specification defines two "concrete syntaxes" for HTML: HTML, and XHTML. The latter supports self-closing <script> tags perfectly fine. The former (the HTML syntax), only allows self-closing tags in two contexts: void tags (of which <script> is not), and foreign tags (e.g., SVG, and XML-like stuff). Now, perhaps you can argue that they should just have allowed it on all elements, such as <script>; frankly, I feel like the reason the standard permits it on void elements at all is just to handle the legions of webdevs out there who think they're writing XHTML but only ever use the syntax for <br/> and are incorrectly serving the resulting soup with text/html. But, if you're writing the HTML syntax, just write the HTML syntax. Some elements require the end tag, some don't. Typically, it is simple enough to tell, simply by asking "could this element have content?" (if yes: end tag, else: no end tag) If you want more consistent parsing rules, that's what the XHTML syntax is for. (Though I agree, it doesn't seem to see much real-world use.) (Frankly, I greatly prefer the gentle fallback of the HTML syntax compared to the hard error of the XHTML syntax, which is considerably user unfriendly.)