XML formatting conventions: Why leave a space before />?

Question

I’ve seen it in several places and e.g. the Eclipse XML auto-formatting does it, too: Put a space before the closing /> of an empty element.

Having

<element attribute="value"/>

would be re-formatted as

<element attribute="value" />

Why would you do that? From the XML point of view it’s equivalent. Is it a convention? Is it for readability?

Answer 1

It is likely done to be safe with XHTML XML, which requires the space in some early XHTML browsers.

Better answer: Space Before Closing Slash?