Strip out HTML from description etc

[kenchris]

Looking at Google Play, it has gone away with formatting (they used to allow a subset of HTML) but fully support unicode, which means that you can use emoji and even emulate bold if you really want to.

There is of course the fear that some future User Agent might render HTML, so it might make sense to specify that the UA should strip out the HTML tags.

[tomayac]

emulate bold if you really want to.

The spec should discourage this. It's a huge pain for screen reader users and definitely not 𝗙𝗨𝗡 to listen to. Try it on macOS:

There is of course the fear that some future User Agent might render HTML, so it might make sense to specify that the UA should strip out the HTML tags.

+1.

[aarongustafson]

Oh @tomayac 😅

[aarongustafson]

I think description should remain text only. I do think there might be some potential in having a separate description_html member that could allow for limited phrase-level formatting. For example:

• b
• em
• i
• strong
• cite (for media titles, which sometimes appear)
• kbd (useful for keyboard shortcuts)

I’d go so far as to say basic flow-level semantics could also be useful, specifically

• p
• ul/ol/li

The only reason I include these is that reading bullets (or asterisks) and line breaks is just as annoying.

Beyond that, however, I think it’s too open to abuse. Implementors would be free to choose whichever and we can develop specific guidance for tag-stripping.