The time to rail against self closing tags is long past. No matter how good your arguments and opinions are, it's here to stay (with and without the '/>'). There are better and more meaningful windmills to tilt against.
If it doesn't do anything - if it doesn't matter, then why care?
I mean this quite literally. Is it worth expending any time or energy on changing habits and tooling when it doesn't matter, and will probably never matter?
> If it doesn't do anything - if it doesn't matter, then why care?
Because it's confusing.
I've been doing this a long time and didn't actually know that /> is meaningless, and it would explain some
random bugs I've worked around in the past.
I've seen people "fix" stuff by adding a "/>" as that's "better".
Other than that, I don't really care because as you mentioned it doesn't really matter. But the needless churn is a bit annoying at times, so not a bad thing to get the message out that it's a XHTML thing and doesn't matter in HTML.
In which case any other windmill could only be more meaningful. :)
I do get what you mean, and self-closing tags makes parsing HTML a royal pain... but it's been the status quo for decades now (self closing tags were in HTML 1.0 IIRC). It's not like they'll change it and break >90% of the internet† just to get rid of an oddity in the HTML spec.
† I do literally mean >90% - self closing tags are everywhere. They're in generated HTML, they're in manually created HTML, they're created by templating languages, and so on.
Sorry.