This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
The <option> tag has "text" as content model, so it cannot contain any tag. Using a syntax like <option>text <b>node</b></option> is invalid in both HTML and XHTML. But the error reports are different. Error: Stray start tag b. [...] Error: Stray end tag b. [...] (HTML) XHTML element b not allowed as child of XHTML element option in this context. (Suppressing further errors from this subtree.) [...] Contexts in which element b may be used: Where phrasing content is expected. Content model for element option: Text. Actually the error is the same. <option> is one of the few tags with content model:text flagging children elements as invalid (it doesn't happen in <title> and <textarea>), but I think the report should be clear.