[Development] Proposal: Disable AutoText in Qt 7

[Andreas Hartmetz]

Am 04.08.26 um 10:46 schrieb Cristián Maureira-Fredes via Development:
> 
> 
> On 8/3/26 7:26 PM, Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
>> Am 29.07.26 um 09:52 schrieb Kai Uwe Broulik:
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> Qt has a feature called AutoText where when you have a label (both in 
>>> Qt Widgets and Qt Quick) and its contents “look like 
>>> HTML” (Qt::mightBeRichText) it will switch to rich text (styled text) 
>>> and start interpreting it as HTML.
>> A probably impractical idea to preserve some of the convenience: 
>> Distinguish "static" text input from "runtime" text input and preserve 
>> the auto rich text feature for the former. Some languages make a 
>> distinction between user-supplied strings and validated strings, but 
>> that seems like much too big of a change. This would need a 
>> predictable and conservative (if in doubt, not richt text) heuristic 
>> to really improve safety and the ability to see through translations 
>> to make it useful enough.
>> Just mentioning it in case somebody can think of a good way to 
>> implement it.
> 
> Like something similar to Template String from Python?
> https://peps.python.org/pep-0750/
> or you had a diff feature from another programming language in mind?
> 

I mainly combined these ideas:
- AutoText is only a security problem if the string is externally
   supplied
- Fixed strings in the (QML) source code are not externally supplied
- The QML engine has some compiler-like facilities that could possibly,
   with minimal extra effort, identify fixed strings in the source code;
   not sure how much of that runs in maximally interpreted mode.

The minimal extra effort part is important for the cost-benefit ratio to 
make any sense.

AutoText also seems most useful when throwing something together quickly 
without much care (prototypes and such), which is a case in which fixed 
or at most translated strings are very common.