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What does this do or mean:
<text area>
[<a href='http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ConfirmSubscribe&friendID=115269282'>Subscribe to this Blog</a>]
</text area>

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Member #114696

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For : the square brackets you see are just characters — they have no built‑in HTML meaning. As noted, text placed inside a textarea is treated as plain text by the browser and any angle‑bracket tags are not executed (see MDN: textarea element). That is why the brackets look like they “do nothing” in the rendered page.

Square brackets can have special meaning in other systems (for example, many forums use BBCode with square‑bracket markup); if the site processing posts supports a markup language, those brackets might be parsed before output. Check the editor help or the rendered source to confirm whether the site interprets bracketed text (see BBCode).

If the goal is to show an actual clickable link rather than visible code, put the anchor markup outside the textarea or convert the textarea contents into rendered HTML in a preview element. Example (basic idea):

<textarea id="source"></textarea>
<div id="preview"></div>

<script>
const ta = document.getElementById('source');
const preview = document.getElementById('preview');

ta.addEventListener('input', () => {
  // Danger: innerHTML with untrusted input can cause XSS.
  preview.innerHTML = ta.value;
});
</script>

If user input is untrusted, sanitize it before assigning to innerHTML (see MDN: Element.innerHTML).

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Member Avatar for Member #114696

they mean nothing except for making this link code differnet or seperate it frm others. but remember whatever written inside textarea will not be considered as html.

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