Remove slash from void elements

[kkmuffme]

• I've read and understood the contribution guidelines.
• I've searched for any related issues and avoided creating a duplicate issue.

Please give us a description of what happened

To Reproduce

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. open any page on frontend and look at the "meta" tags

Expected results

1. void elements should not have a / before >

Actual results

Void elements contain outdated XHTML /> which is not valid HTML (but silently ignored)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Void_element
WordPress never serves a page with content-type application/xhtml+xml, therefore the XHTML compatibility is pointless.

WP core is currently also undergoing some changes to fix it in core https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59883

E.g. on previous PR consistently added them #16952 - but since the last 3 years (even back then it was outdated) it's become completely unused and should be removed.

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

If possible, please provide a screenshot, a screen recording or a code snippet which demonstrates the bug.

Technical info

Used versions

• Yoast SEO version: 23.9

[josevarghese]

Hi @kkmuffme

Thanks for creating the issue.

This issue is a duplicate of the issue #2223, which got marked as closed with no plan to change this as it was not causing any problems or breaking anything with the meta tag being read by search engines. However, I asked our development team to check whether this change is required or not.

I will update you once I get more details.

[kkmuffme]

Thanks. The referenced issue is almost 10 years old and things have changed since then, therefore I think it's valid to bring this up again. Especially if you look at the recent comments on that issue e.g. #2223 (comment)

[josevarghese]

Internal Slack conversation: https://yoast.slack.com/archives/C01NCRHHN30/p1732452686091819

[BradFD]

+1 for no slashes as the new default.