N ways to use the HTML API in WordPress

[bph]

Discussed in #313

^{Originally posted by ndiego September 25, 2024}
The title is TBD, but the idea of this article is to showcase the many different ways that you can use the HTML API in WordPress plugins and themes. The article will begin with an overview of the HTML API followed by N practical examples that developers can use in their own projects.

The HTML API is an incredibly useful new addition to WordPress, but we have not showcased it enough on the blog. The goal of this article is to inspire folks to begin using the API and exploring what it can do. The article should also include a quick highlight of future enhancements that will be coming in future WordPress releases.

[dmsnell]

• Convert HTML to Markdown.
• Extract isolated/contained fragments of a post for quoting.
• Better search results with rich previews.
• Analyze HTML contents and lint for cases where it will be interpreted differently than the author might expect.
• Normalize inbound HTML and XML from external sources, RSS feeds, ActivityPub, etc…
• Stronger interop with social media through structured conversion from HTML into the formats they expect.
• Dual plaintext/richtext views of HTML throughout the interface (HTML titles are text-only, but may have formatting in RSS, for example).
• In-database upgrades of old blocks.