What's at the end of empty xhtml tags?

[Lars Eighner]

If < is stago, </ is etago, > is tagc, what is the />
at the end of empty xhtml tags?
--
Lars Eighner us****@larseighner.com http://www.larseighner.com/
War on Terrorism: Treat Viewers like Mushrooms
"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in
Afghanistan." -Walter Isaacson, _CNN_

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Lars Eighner wrote:

If < is stago, </ is etago, > is tagc, what is the />
at the end of empty xhtml tags?

It is NESTC followed by NET.

XML and XHTML specifications do not use concepts like STAGO, ETAGO,
TAGC, etc., since they lack the level of abstraction that these terms
relate to. In SGML, STAGO stands for start tag open, which can be a
different character or string in different SGML-based languages, though
most of them use the "reference" (default) syntax where STAGO is "<".

When SGML was obscured to allow the simplification known as XML to be
treated formally as SGML, via the so-called Web Adaptations Annex, the
term NESTC was introduced. It stands for "NET-enabling start tag close",
where "NET" means "null end tag". In "<br/>", the "/" is NESTC and
the ">" is NET, so in terms of (transmogrified) SGML, "<br/>" is two
tags, the start tag "<br/" and the end tag ">".

More info: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/empty.html#diff