Thanks.

  My two cents...I always give a user the ability to create HTML...but save both the HTML and plain text.

  I almost always end up having to create a search tool for user entered data! When creating abstracts for search results...you just simply cannot count on the returned HTML to be complete...which will cause malformed HTML content results. Using the plain text in your search abstracts prevents malformed HTML in your page displaying the search results...but when a user clicks on a returned link, you can now provide them with the full HTML content.

 

Whenever possible, force people to entered structured content via content templates (ie, forms).

 

For instance, a job posting would have fields as such:

 

title: ___________________

classification: _______________

pay rate: ______________

dud date: _______________

 

etc...

Then, you'd format this yourself when you grab the data and build the HTML via the CMS.

 

However, there are times when you need to allow people to enter free-form content.

 

In that case, I'm trying to restrict the HTML editor to only allow the basic structured tags: Paragraphs, headers, lists,etc. I'm trying to avoid any presentational markup.

 

And that is what we're storing in the database.

 

Ideally, I suppose, you'd store XML mapped against a schema then transform that, but we're not that far yet ;o)

 

I like Bruce D's suggestion about saving two versions. In my case, when I pull up content as a snippet/abstract I first remove all HTML tags via a regex leaving just the text.