Spec shows illegal end tags

[danorton]

In your example of a YouTube request, you show an example that demonstrates a bug.

There is no such thing as "" or "".

The PARAM end tag is forbidden in HTML4:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#h-13.3.2

The EMBED tag is an HTML5 construct, and its end tag is also forbidden:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#elements-0
“Void elements only have a start tag; end tags must not be specified for void elements.”

Reported to Google here:

http://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=2346

[iamcal]

I don't really see this as a spec issue for two reasons:

1. It's an accurate example of what a provider returns
2. The spec does not say that you can't return XHTML

Further more, the spec does not mandate that the HTML must be 'valid' against any specific spec - the goal is for it to work in browsers.

[danorton]

If this intends to be a specific-ation, it needs to be specific.

No, it doesn’t say that it can’t return XHTML, but it doesn’t say it can’t return marshmallows, either. It does clearly say, however, “HTML”. If that’s not true, then that’s the problem and not the example. Either way, the example should agree with the details of the specification.

If the goal is “to work in browsers”, that’s a fine goal and perhaps that’s something for a meta section, along with the examples.

Why not simply say that it’s “XHTML 1.0 Strict”? This will inform page designers that they need to include the DOCTYPE declaration and it will inform providers of the level of conformity that clients expect. (Better still would be separate request and response fields with that level of detail, but that's beyond the scope of this particular issue.)