Given that the release notes are largely HTML (with a minor template component) inside the doc directory of the main Go repository, and so people often rightfully do not run trybots before submitting changes. A good solution to this should take that into account.

I've searched through the release notes for many Go releases, and I'm seeing that most of them do not actually use the template functionality for anything, other than to escape {{ and }} itself. So a good solution may be to turn off the template functionality, and enable it only when it is needed.

I see that go1.html uses templates quite a bit:

doc/go1.html:
   62  </p>
   63  
   64: {{code "/doc/progs/go1.go" `/greeting := ..byte/` `/append.*hello/`}}
   65  
   66  <p>
   ..
   71  </p>
   72  
   73: {{code "/doc/progs/go1.go" `/append.*world/`}}
   74  
   75  <p>
   ..
  121  </p>
  122  
  123: {{code "/doc/progs/go1.go" `/type Date struct/` `/STOP/`}}
  124  
  125  <p>
   ..

But none of the other releases (1.1 through 1.14) do.

Change https://golang.org/cl/218058 mentions this issue: doc/go1.14: disable text/template processing in HTML page

people often rightfully do not run trybots before submitting changes

#37047 is closely related, in that it would also (ideally) detect issues in generated HTML during TryBot runs.

Change https://golang.org/cl/218217 mentions this issue: content/static/doc: escape template brackets in code.html

This just bit me on CL 217877, too — and it did have a TryBot +1.

I think we really do need to test the rendered templates in some form. (Reopening.)

The scope of this issue was about the draft release notes, and that's been fixed. I'll revert the issue to reflect that.

Opened #37090 to track testing improvements for catching problems on pages that still use template mode.

Change https://golang.org/cl/229079 mentions this issue: content: convert doc/{conduct,security}.html to non-template