CGI.pm and XHTML

Ovid has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

From perldoc CGI

By default, CGI.pm versions 2.69 and higher emit XHTML (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/). The -no_xhtml pragma disables this feature. Thanks to Michalis Kabrianis <kabrianis@hellug.gr> for this feature.

I am using CGI.pm version 2.74.

Here's the program:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use CGI::Pretty qw( :standard );

print header,
      start_html( -title   => 'Password Check',
                  -BGCOLOR => 'navy',
                  -text    => 'white' ),
      h1( 'It worked' ),
      hr(),
      br(),
      end_html;
[download]

Here's the output:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
        "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US"><head><title>P
+assword Check</title>
</head><body text="white" bgcolor="navy">
<h1>
        It worked
</h1>
<hr><br></body></html>
[download]

According to the w3c spec (see section 4.6, "Empty Elements):

Empty elements must either have an end tag or the start tag must end with />. For instance, <br/> or <hr></hr>.

Unfortunately, the hr and br tags output by the CGI.pm HTML functions aren't valid XHTML. Is this a bug or is it a feature of transitional XHTML? Do others have this issue?

Cheers,
Ovid

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