Overview

The Service Management Platform can display HTML formatting in several places. Which tags and attributes are shown is controlled by platform settings, so administrators decide how much formatting is allowed. Tags and attributes that are not allowed are not displayed as formatting.

This article describes the platform settings, their default values and how the Agent UI treats HTML. We recommend that you keep the default values unless you have a clear need for more formatting, because every additional tag or attribute widens what content can display.

Platform Settings

The following platform settings control HTML display. Setting names, default values and availability can change between versions. Check the platform settings editor of your environment for the values in use.

The mail settings are separate from the other settings. A tag that you allow for values does not become available in mail content, and the other way around.

HTML in Agent UI

Agent UI displays HTML formatting in list view cells, in the tooltips that show the values of a referenced data card, in the bulk edit dialog and in the values of data card attributes. The following rules apply in these places.

• Tags that are not in html.allowed.tags are removed, and the text inside them is kept. In text and default data card attributes, paragraph, line break, list, heading, blockquote, preformatted and div tags are kept even when they are not in the setting.
• Attributes that are not in html.allowed.attributes are removed. The style of an element, for example its color or font weight, is therefore shown only when you add style to the allowed attributes.
• A link is shown only if the a tag and the href attribute are allowed (neither is allowed by default) and the link protocol is allowed by html.allowed.link.protocols. Otherwise the link text is shown as plain text. Links that are shown open in a new browser tab. Links that start with javascript: or data: are never shown as links.
• Some CSS properties are removed even when style is allowed, for example position, width, height, margin, opacity and transform.

Content that is never Shown

Agent UI removes some content whatever the platform settings say. Adding these tags or attributes to the settings has no effect.

• The tags blink, marquee, applet, basefont, embed, frame, frameset, iframe, isindex, listing, noembed, noframes, object, plaintext, spacer and xmp are removed, and the text inside them is kept. This includes blink and marquee from the default value of html.allowed.tags.
• The tag script is removed together with everything inside it.
• The attributes size and face are removed, and so are all attributes whose name starts with on, such as onclick.

List View Cells and Tooltips

List view cells and reference tooltips keep text at one size so that rows stay even. Headings (h1 to h6) and the tags big, small, sub and sup are shown as plain text, and the CSS properties font-size and line-height are removed. The same HTML in the value of a data card attribute keeps its headings and font sizes.

Example

If you want to show merged cells in email tables, you allow the rowspan attribute for mail content. The tags table, tr, td and th and the attribute colspan are already allowed by default.

1. Open the platform settings editor.
2. Find mail.html.allowed.attributes.
3. Add rowspan to the value and save the setting.

More Information

For the list of capabilities that Agent UI supports, see Supported Capabilities in the New Agent UI.