At Last... HtmlCompat

In the 28.0.0 edition of the support libraries ActiveX AndroidX Jetpack(?), we will get an HtmlCompat , offering an API compatible with the current implementation of Html . This will be very useful for getting consistent results both pre- and post-API Level 24, when the API was revamped, which deprecated methods like the one-parameter version of Html.fromHtml() .

Such a class had been suggested two years ago, and it’s good to see that it was added.

OTOH, HtmlCompat suffers from the same documentation limitation as does Html : no specification for what subset of HTML is supported. API Level 24 expanded the support from the roster that I wrote up 8 years ago, but there is no official list of what is and is not supported. As a result, handing arbitrary HTML to HtmlCompat is still risky, in that you might wind up with a mix of actual formatting and unprocessed HTML tags.

But, this is still a step in the right direction, and I am grateful for it.

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— May 29, 2018