Well... :-)
That particular issue has a lot of shared history behind it. Believe it or
not, a silly little compromise was made a long time ago, that the transition
to putting </p> in the spec would be tolerated by its opponents as long as
it didn't appear in the examples. I believe that one little compromise
dissipated a lot of tension in the room, and we all went out immediately and
enjoyed Chinese food together.
This is a collaborative effort. Some people will read this spec and not
know that a lot of the work that went into it had more to do with people
than technology. Working "together" is a very high value indeed, and
resolving people issues is usually a lot harder and messier than resolving
technology issues. Trying to do both at the same time, occasionally results
in something a little bit quirky, like "no </p> in the examples".
-- Eric W. Sink Senior Software Engineer, Spyglass eric@spyglass.com