[tannhaeuser]

These two things have nothing to do with each other though:

- HTML doesn't have XML-style empty elements such as in "<div/>" and simply ignores the slash, treating the construct as start-element tag

- HTML is "hardcoded" in that the vocabulary understood by the browser is determined out of band, whether for empty ("void") elements or not. An SGML DTD (like the W3C HTML 4.01 DTD or newer DTDs for HTML 5+, which would be the means to inform a parser about the parsing rules for a markup language dynamically), actually contains declarations for the meta, img, and other elements as having EMPTY content, along with tag inference and attribute shortform rules also necessary for parsing.