On first save, angle brackets save as entities & lt ; and & gt ;. This is probably what's wanted. On clicking edit, they get converted into real angle brackets and are then visible only when you click on the HTML button.
Here's some text that i just typed in and saved. If you try to edit it, you'll see the described behavior:
/wagn/new/<cardtype>
[<span></span>[if users want HTML they should use the HTML window]] (well, for this specific case, we want to implement Escaping for links and inclusion :-)
NOTE: pls don't edit this discussion directly! We'll lose the <> info. Comments only!
It looks to me like the problem is a tinyMCE problem. Everything looks fine in the database. eg:
<p><test></p>
When the payload for tinyMCE comes back, it looks to me like it gets this:
<input id="main_1-hidden-content" name="card[content]" type="hidden" value="<p>&lt;test&gt;</p>" />
You can see the & in < gets converted to &, so you'd think it should survive one round of unescaping, but apparently tinyMCE is doing two rounds, and then filtering out unknown html tags (in this case, <test>).
I don't quite get it, but it looks to me like this got fixed somewhere along the way? Can't reproduce it any more...
--Ethan McCutchen.....Mon Oct 18 22:22:30 -0700 2010
closing.
--Ethan McCutchen.....Mon Nov 01 21:37:42 -0700 2010
Fixed in Basic, but not in Phrase or PlainText. See stop filtering angle brackets in Phrase and PlainText.
--John Abbe.....Mon Feb 28 16:07:50 -0800 2011