http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/archive/2009/07/08/empty-elements-and-self-closing-tags.aspxLast January, I blogged about an approach to normalizing LINQ to XML trees . That post is based on another post, Manually Cloning LINQ to XML Trees . In those posts, my code to clone an element would clone a self-closing element (<Tag/>) as self-closing,enCommunityServer 2.1 SP1 (Build: 61025.2)