When does a tag need the closing tag <> </>
and when does it not? < >

My brain is fried from reading and being on the computer all day.

Thanks for your help

There are only a few tags that don't need it and those would best be described as ones where content doesn't exist within them.
For example:
Line Breaks - <br />
Horizontal Rules - <hr />
In XHTML the traling "/>" acts as the closing tag.

Thanks imagn - That was a great way to describe it. Makes more sense to me now.

Tags like those are called "self-closing" tags. Any tag that can't contain other content (for example, an image, line break, horizontal rule, meta tag, etc.) must be self-closing.

In XML (and therefore XHTML), <foo></foo> and <foo /> are identical as far as the parser is concerned, but in reality, there are browser problems where you have to use one or the other. For example, you can't do <script type="text/javascript" src="foo.js" /> because most browsers don't properly detect the script tag as being closed.

Normal WYSIWYG programs like Dreamweaver do this for you, although many people don't like to use these programs as they can add-in unnecessary code along with other problems ...still got my vote though.

Posted by imagn How do I post quotes?

There are only a few tags that don't need it and those would best be described as ones where content doesn't exist within them.
For example:
Line Breaks - <br />
Horizontal Rules - <hr />
In XHTML the traling "/>" acts as the closing tag.

This is right, the XHTML closing tag also applies to the image tag, we usually use <img src=""></img> right, but it's more easier now because instead of that we just close it after declaring the src="" or anything that follows after). <img src="" />

Actually most of the html tags has ending tag. But there are some tags dont have end tag. For example break tag, hr tag dont have tag mostly these are the two which will use very useful in most of the coding.