The RSS Specification notes that the within the <item><description> element entity-encoded HTML is allowed, so it would be preferrable for it to be possible to add basic HTML formatting tags like <b>, <i>, tables with <table>, and links with <a href=...> to a bulletin entry (ideally with a simple editor to avoid having to code them manually)
Indeed should you choose to do this now, the 'classic' iSAMS UI dashboard Bulletin element will render the tagged items correctly, as will your typical RSS reader using the bulletin feed. However, neither the new iSAMS dashboard widget, nor the iTeacher app will do this, they just display any HTML tags in a bulletin as plain text. Please can the Bulletin widget and iTeacher app be made consistent with the classic dashboard and RSS spec and render key HTML tags in an item body to allow basic formatting and links to be added to entries?
Related to this, when a bulletin item body is output to the RSS feed, iSAMS strips out all of the line breaks and just runs everything together as one long string. This could be solved by it instead replacing the linefeeds with the HTML tag <br/>. As it stands when staff submit a bulletin for authorisation, I end up editing it to manually add <br/> tags in place of the line breaks, but of course this then causes those items to render incorrectly in iTeacher.
And, when each bulletin item is exported to the RSS feed the <pubDate> element is populated with the date of the bulletin but the time portion is always set to 00:00. This means that if an item is edited or added during the day, then RSS readers/triggers don't always spot the new or amended items. e.g. using Microsoft Flow to post the RSS to a Teams channel misses all new entries. Please could the <pubDate> element
use the submission time for new and amended entries on the same day, and
have a configurable default time, rather than midnight, so that the posting of bulletin entries via RSS to (e.g.)Teams happens at a sensible time, and not in the wee small hours?
