including html within an rss feed.

"it is a matter of great debate as to whether the <description> element within rss 0.92, 2.0 and 1.0 may contain html. in my opinion, it should not. this is for both a practical and a philosophical reason. practically speaking, including html markup requires the client software to have the ability to parse or filter it. whilst this is fine with many desktop agents, it is restricting for developers looking for other uses of the data. this brings us onto the philosophical aspect. rss’s second use, after providing headlines and content to desktop readers and sites, is to provide indexable metadata. by combining presentation and content, by including html markup within the <description> element, we start to risk breaking this feature." – ben hammersley, "content syndication with rss".