Why does Javadoc generate non-compliant XHTML?

Question

I just pasted some generated javadoc into an eclipse project, to discover none of the HTML is compliant.

There is even cases of closing tags that were never opened.

Answer 1

The short answer is that JavaDocs predate XHTML.

There was an interesting thread on the Java Posse group about this recently that you might find interesting: why is javadoc stuck in 1997?