When using the htmltidy plugin (and possibly in other circumstances), ikiwiki sometimes creates more </p> tags than <p> tags, causing unbalanced markup. I've previously noticed unbalanced tags when a [[!map ]] matches no pages. This is part of the reason I developed htmlbalance.

This is particularly noticeable if htmltidy is enabled when building the docwiki: on the 'contrib' plugin pages, the title becomes foo </p> (third-party plugin) (with the angle-brackets escaped - it seems the text gets sanitized but is then escaped anyway).

I believe that this snippet in IkiWiki.pm might be the reason for the imbalance:

    if ($oneline) {
            # hack to get rid of enclosing junk added by markdown
            # and other htmlizers
            $content=~s/^<p>//i;
            $content=~s/<\/p>$//i;
            chomp $content;
    }

The fact that HTML in a [[!meta title]] is added but then escaped might indicate that some other bug is involved.

done --Joey