Allowed HTML tags in Javadoc

Question

The Checkstyle rule JavadocStyle does not allow the tag . According to the docs, the checks were patterned after the checks made by the DocCheck doclet

Answer 1

There are no real restrictions on the use of HTML in Javadoc comments. The Javadoc documentation states:

Comments are written in HTML - The text must be written in HTML, in that they should use HTML entities and can use HTML tags. You can use whichever version of HTML your browser supports; we have written the standard doclet to generate HTML 3.2-compliant code elsewhere (outside of the documentation comments) with the inclusion of cascading style sheets and frames. (We preface each generated file with "HTML 4.0" because of the frame sets.)

The list of allowed HTML tags is hardcoded in the JavadocStyle Checkstyle check (verified by looking at the Checkstyle 5.6 sources). So if you want to keep the check for its other good properties, you will have to live with the restricted set of HTML tags. One workaround for the underline problem is to use CSS (which is allowed) like this:

underlined text