Does the <li> tag in HTML have an ending tag?

Question

So, I was learning about lists in HTML at college and the professor said <li> doesn't have an ending tag </li> along with some other tags like <img> and <br>. Is that correct or not? Because I've seen a lot of templates / themes using tag at the end, as well many sites also teach you that </li> exists, so I'm not sure whom to believe and what is correct way of using <li>?

The reason why I'm asking this is because last time we learned about <img> tag, he said that the alt="" attribute gives you a text displayed over the image when you hover the mouse, which turned it's only alternative text for broken images when I asked here and he was wrong for that case, which also made me wonder this as well.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The li element has an end tag (</li>), but it’s optional in some cases:

An li element's end tag may be omitted if the li element is immediately followed by another li element or if there is no more content in the parent element.

Answer 2

It is not good coding practice to leave out the end tags.

If you always write the end tags in

1. you will never have an issue if you need to change from HTML to XHTML
2. you will always know where the end of the element is
3. it's cleaner and easier to read.

Semantically, all tags have a beginning tag and an end tag, whether you use them or not is a different matter entirely.