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in reply to HTML::TreeBuilder and HTML4.01 empty elements

The relevant code in HTML::Element->starttag is this: 
    if ( scalar $self->content_list == 0 && $self->_empty_element_map-
+>{ $self->tag } ) {
        return $tag . " />";
    }
    else {
        return $tag . ">";
    }

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Since hr, br, and img never have children, the first condition is always true. So we'll have to tweak the second one to get the output you want.

Here's a quick hack that works: 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use HTML::TreeBuilder;

my $h = HTML::Element->new_from_lol(
            ['html',
                ['hr'],
                ['br'],
                ['img',    {src => 'pic.jpg'}],
            ],
);

{
  # suppress xhtml /> on these tags:
  my @noslash = qw/ hr br img /;
  # by temporarily pretending the can have content:
  local @HTML::Tagset::emptyElement{ @noslash } = 0;
  # and have optional end tags:
  local @HTML::Tagset::optionalEndTag{ @noslash } = (1) x @noslash;

  print $h->as_HTML;
}

__END__
<html><hr><br><img src="pic.jpg"></html>

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