Possible use cases for an empty span that I can think of off the top of 
my hat:

  * Clearfix
  * As a placeholder that will be filled/replaced by javascript
  * As a placeholder that will be filled/replaced by a pandoc filter
  * As an anchor for before/after pseudoelements
  * As a container for a background-image
  * As a piece in some CSS trickery to get fancy effects without images
  * To have the right count of elements for some table-like presentation
  * Because of symmetry with some other structure where there is content
    inside the span

There's probably a lot more, these are just some cases I thought of. Is 
an empty span always the /best/ solution to these problems? Probably 
not. But sometimes it is.

The most relevant as it relates to pandoc is probably the third one: in 
a pandoc filter. Because of that I would not want to see this feature be 
removed.

Now, should the span be self-closing? That's a different question. I 
suspect that /that's/ the main reason for many/all of the errors you're 
seeing, not the pure empty-ness. So that might be something worth 
changing. But as you're saying, that's a Hakyll problem, not a Pandoc 
problem.


Cheers.

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