Nope, that's the whole point. You’re free to use the solidus in the HTML serialization of HTML5.
In the XHTML serialization of HTML5, the solidus isn’t required either; you can choose to close the elements instead.
The following examples are both confirming/valid HTML5 in ‘XML mode’ (they’re valid XHTML1 as well):
a) With solidus
<img src="foo" alt="bar" />
b) Without solidus
<img src="foo" alt="bar"></img>
Just to be clear though, in my post I was just pointing out that you don’t have to change anything in your HTML4/XHTML code to switch to HTML5, except for the DOCTYPE.
I'm skeptical about the increased casual nature of what makes for an acceptable HTML-serialized HTML5 doc. Seems it just makes it that much harder to write a robust parser and tools. Especially the continued use of empty attribute syntax, which is just nasty. I understand it's to allow plain old HTML docs to be acceptable, but still ...
In the XHTML serialization of HTML5, the solidus isn’t required either; you can choose to close the elements instead.
The following examples are both confirming/valid HTML5 in ‘XML mode’ (they’re valid XHTML1 as well):
a) With solidus
b) Without solidus Just to be clear though, in my post I was just pointing out that you don’t have to change anything in your HTML4/XHTML code to switch to HTML5, except for the DOCTYPE.