Text formatting and semantics

Tags

MessageML supports the following tags for formatting content within a message:

Tag	Description	Optional attributes
<br/>	Insert a line break.	None.
<a href="url"> Link Text </a>	Insert a hyperlink that will be displayed in the message.	• href: the URL of the link • class: color options.
<b>text</b>	Bold formatting. Note: when receiving a message from an Agent that contains whitespace between the last character in a bolded section and the closing </b> tag, the bold section will be returned in Markdown (i.e. surrounded by double '*' characters) instead of XHTML tags.	• class: color options.
<i>text</i>	Italics formatting. Note: when receiving a message from an Agent that contains whitespace between the last character in an italics-formatted section and the closing </i> tag, the italics section will be returned in Markdown (i.e. surrounded by single '*' characters) instead of XHTML tags.	• class: color options.
<pre> preformatted text </pre>	Preformatted text.	• class: color options. • Non-HTML MessageML shorthand tags are not supported inside <pre>.
<span>text</span>	No formatting. • This tag can be used to specify visual styles, by adding a class attribute. • This tag is used to create Structured objects.	• class: color options. • data-entity-id • See below for list of translated PresentationML attributes.
<code>code sample</code>	Format the text as a block of code.	language: Use the language attribute to benefit from language specific code highlighting. The following languages are available: c, cpp, csharp, css, html, java, js, jsx, php, python, r, typescript, tsx, plaintext, yaml, scala, json, shell, markdown Note: language attribute is only available with Agent 20.14+. Note: please see escaping rules for Special Characters when using code tag

Examples

Here after you can find an example of a message sent by a bot and containing these formatting and semantics tags as well as the structure of the messageML sent:

Message containing formatting and semantics tags

messageML structure

<messageML>
    <h1>Formatting and semantics</h1>
    <p>This is a <a href="https://docs.developers.symphony.com/">Link</a> to our developer documentation.</p>
    <p>Part 1 of the paragraph separated from part 2 with a line break.<br/>Part 2 of the paragraph.</p>
    <p>This text can be either <b>bold</b> or <i>italic</i> or <span style="color:red;">red</span>, or even combine <b><i style="color:red;">several</i></b> formatting tags.</p>
    <pre>This is a preformatted text.</pre>
    <code language="html">&lt;h1&gt;Code sample&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is some html&lt;/p&gt;</code>
</messageML>

Versions and Compatibility

Main features introduced	Agent needed to parse message sent by the bot	Client 2.0 release	Backward client-compatibility behavior (e.g. external rooms)	Client 1.5 release
Initial release	Since the first version	Since the first version	-	Since the first version
Closing <b> and <i> without line breaks*	Since the first version	Since the first version	-	1.53
Support of the language attribute on <code> blocks.	Agent 20.14	Since the first version	-