iCal displays .ics event description HTML as plain text
I run a small web app that aggregates several public Google calendars of local orgs and provides a combined .ics calendar feed for apps like iCal and Google Calendar. When the iCal app imports a calendar event from a Google calendar that has HTML in the event description, the HTML is displayed as plaintext instead of parsing as HTML. This results in events with descriptions like this:
<a href="IMGUR_LINK_REDACTED" target="_blank">A weekly distribution table</a> for hot meals and other essential supplies for the REDACTED community.<br><br>Please feel free to reach out to us at REDACTED on instagram or <a href="mailto:REDACTED" target="_blank">REDACTED</a> with any questions or to get more involved
That gets pretty annoying, especially for users who don't understand what's going on. I assume the fix is simple: parse the incoming text of a description (and only the description) for events in .ics files as HTML and display it as such. The only thing to protect against is `<script>` tags; those shouldn't be parsed. But other than that you can simply display the HTML as you would a web page.
iPhone 17 Pro, iOS 26