Really, just a reminder for myself, but if you work with SharePoint long enough you’re bound to end up using something like the Content Query Web Part or a Data View Web Part to aggregate and output a rich text source – but all your HTML gets escaped, so it appears content on the page.

The command you want is DisableOutputEscaping:

<xsl:value-of select="somevalue" disable-output-escaping="yes" />

This will cause the HTML to be output unescaped – i.e. as HTML.

Side note: Sometimes people want things like the CQWP to show the first part of the content as a ‘summary’. This trucating content to display in the CQWP or DVWP is difficult; either a) you risk having unfinished tags in the HTML you do emit, or b) you have to strip out all HTML, which can ruin your formatting. a) is a particular problem, as unfinished <table> tags can cause all sorts of weirdness on page.

My preferred option is to have a additional ‘summary text’ box that accepts plain text, and have the author generate the summary manually. That way we avoid outputting HTML like that entirely.