disableoutputescaping

DisableOutputEscaping is a directive in Apache and mod_python web servers that instructs the server to prevent certain types of output escaping from occurring in HTML and other formats. Typically, web servers incorporate escaping of special characters within user-generated content as a security precaution to prevent malicious script execution.

Disabling output escaping can be necessary in certain situations, such as when a web application needs to render user input directly into an HTML response without modifying the characters. This is especially common in applications such as blogs and wikis, where user might not intend to write in HTML.

However, disabling output escaping should be employed with caution as it can open up web applications to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and break certain features in web content. Some libraries implementing this feature may have configuration settings to allow developers to choose where the feature is enabled or disabled.

While some web development frameworks are known to implicitly control and implement their own form of disabling output escaping that might be incompatible with server-side configurations and might not meet the possessing application's standards. These incompatibilities may either make the framework unprofitable for the chosen directive, or in most cases necessitate the use of developer-created (or sourced) possibly both custom and portable workarounds. This would ultimately allow both developers to access content represented in a variety of output streams while they avoid either duplication or DID the OFFHeaderCode and dev_* prearelaunch.websessionheader*.