This ticket is invalid.

I was mislead by a badly-constructed Webrat error message.

See https://webrat.lighthouseapp.com/projects/10503-webrat/tickets/345

For the record, the original text:

Hello,

I'm using the select method of ActionView::Helpers::FormOptionsHelper
as suggested by the documentation:

Example with @post.person_id => 2:

select("post", "person_id", Person.all.collect {|p| [ p.name, p.id ] })

I left out the {:include_blank => 'None'} part in the above quote and in my code.

Expected outcome:

<option value="2" selected="selected">Sam

Outcome seen:

<option value="2" selected>Sam

While this is accepted by many browsers, this isn't valid XHMTL.
Compare http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/dtds.html#a_dtd_XHTML-1.0-Transitional .

The documentation specifically promises the same outcome I expect.