This is "the Right Thing to do"(tm).
The trailing slash is a necessity to make it validate as XHTML, which incidentally is the w3c's current recommendation for HTML markup. - And the only one that will be expanded in the future.
- but i might agree... - there should probably be a switch to toggle it off, if you insist on creating old-school HTML4 (or godforbid 3.2!)
Interestingly, the HTML W3C validator fails the end tag. And does not mention it might be XHTML. It doesnt seem to break the browsers I am testing, so I will ignore it until I learn XHTML. -next week. ;) But, to address your toggle idea as a techno newbie. If you could set a namespace or SiteAccess/HostMonster space to the CONTENT-TYPE or ISO-XXX, then Zope would render based on this property. This would require additional render libraries for Zope, but might open it to support different standards. Thanks, -Trevor