Can't close css code

I am a rank beginner. I have been following instructions in Lloyd book on how to embed css. I entered the following:

<link href=“style2.css”
rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css”/>

But each time I save it in NVU it drops the closing /…and I get this:

<link href=“style2.css”
rel=“stylesheet” type=“text/css”>

The embedded link does not affect the web pages. Is it because the closing slash is not there? And why won’t it include it?

Thanks.

This is the Doctype from a Kompozer file.

<! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "//W3C// DTD HTML 4.01 // EN “http://www.w3.org//TR/html4/ strict.dtd”>

So the editor has kindly deleted the / for you so that the tag is correct rather than having an error.

HTML does not use / in the end of tags, only XHTML does that.

The closing slash is for use under XHTML. HTML 4 doesn’t require it (and in fact, counts as a syntax error).

What are you using for a DOCTYPE?