What's the Deal with Using HTML in My Item Descriptions? Is it Allowed?

You can use most HTML in your item descriptions, however there are some considerations you should be aware of when choosing what and how much HTML to use:

1. Buyers choose whether they want to see HTML. Just as you can use whatever HTML you want in your item description, buyers can strip out that HTML and choose to all listings as plain text. If a buyer with HTML disabled sees your HTML listing, they will see a link that lets them they can turn on HTML to view your item with HTML, but it is at their discretion whether they choose to do so*.
2. Not all HTML will work. There is a particular type of web security loophole called an "XSS attack" that allows hackers to do bad things to web sites that allow users to input whatever HTML they want and display it to users. We filter all HTML descriptions and strip out any elements that we can not verify as definitely not able to be used as an XSS element. Of course, 99.9% of the time, the HTML that was stripped was not bad HTML, but for buyers to trust Bonanza, our filter errs on the side of caution.
3. Our description entry area sucks for writing HTML. You didn't need us to tell you this, but our description editor has been designed for plain text descriptions. It's not big, and it's not easy to write HTML in. You can use our WYSIWYG editor, which improves things somewhat.

Those considerations aside, you can use most standard HTML elements, and view your item listing to see how it turns out.

* How does the site go about showing an HTML item description sans the HTML? We just strip all of the HTML tags, and keep the line breaks. It actually looks surprisingly decent, most of the time.