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It is very wrong to use closing slash in HTML - it has completely different meaning in SGML than in XML. https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/empty.html

And even if you have XHTML doctype but do not server your document with XHTML MIME type browsers will treat it as HTML. So all "liking" to use XHTML syntax in HTML were just lucky that no mainstream browser bothered to implement this part of SGML handling correctly.

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>It is very wrong to use closing slash in HTML

Nope, it's not. In HTML5 it's just optional. From the W3C standard:

>Then, if the element is one of the void elements, or if the element is a foreign element, then there may be a single "/" (U+002F) character. This character has no effect on void elements, but on foreign elements it marks the start tag as self-closing.

And to clarify, HTML5 just codified what the browsers have always been doing. The HTML4 standards did not allow <br /> but all browsers accepted it just fine.

The worst bit is that when you do use the XHTML MIME type, most browsers would give a big error message about parsing errors. And then there was the bug in IE7 or IE8 where both the doctype and xml deceleration had to be on the first line to have an effect.

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