No, he's right. Allow me to quote from W3C's
XHTML 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition) specification, to be precise, 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>. See HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ways to ensure this is backward compatible with HTML 4 user agents.
Now, it's true that in the same document, one of the appendices,
C.2. Empty Elements recommends using <br />, but that's just a recommendation, empty elements with a open and end tag
are allowed.
