When should I use one or the other?

Question

At a previous time I learned that a line break is <br>. Through the tutorial, once I reached line break it was taught as <br />. After this I clicked "try it yourself" to test if my previous knowledge worked, and it did. Googling it made me see that one goes for HTML other goes for XHTML, -EXCLUSIVELY-

Question is - Is the statement "<br> works only in html, and <br /> works only in xhtml" true when the browser that interprets the code can read only html or xhtml, and not both?

What I mean is that when I "try it yourself" both worked. So when do they not work, and when should I use one or the other?

Answer 1

Andrei Belcu <br> is all the browser needs to parse correctly.

<br /> makes it compatible for loading in XML parsers and is often what gets written when being generated from an XML parser.

It doesn't hurt to use <br />, but it isn't required.

Personally, due to all my XML work from years ago, I use self closing br tags out of habit.

Answer 2

In HTML5 <br> don't need to be closed.
I mean no need for <br/>