Sanitizing descriptions before saving a record has a few drawbacks:
1. It makes the application rely on data being safe in the database. If
somehow dangerous data enters the database, the application will be
vulnerable to XSS attacks
2. It makes the code complicated
3. It isn't backwards compatible; if we decide to disallow a certain
HTML tag in the future, we'd need to sanitize existing data.
On the other hand, sanitizing the data in the view means we don't need
to triple-check dangerous HTML has already been stripped when we see the
method `auto_link_already_sanitized_html`, since now every time we use
it we sanitize the text in the same line we call this method.
We could also sanitize the data twice, both when saving to the database
and when displaying values in the view. However, doing so wouldn't make
the application safer, since we sanitize text introduced through
textarea fields but we don't sanitize text introduced through input
fields.
Finally, we could also overwrite the `description` method so it
sanitizes the text. But we're already introducing Globalize which
overwrites that method, and overwriting it again is a bit too confusing
in my humble opinion. It can also lead to hard-to-debug behaviour.
This way we can simplify the way we generate form fields. In some cases,
we also use the human attribute in table headers, which IMHO makes
sense.
I haven't moved all of them: for example, sometimes a label is
different depending on whether it's shown to administrators, valuators,
or users. And I haven't touched the ones related to devise, since I
wasn't sure about possible side effects.
Note I've also removed placeholders when they had the same text as their
labels, since they weren't helpful. On the contrary, the added redundant
text to the form, potentially distracting users.
We needed to bring back support for CKEditor in our translatable form,
which we had temporarily remove.
And now we support CKEditor in our translatable specs, and so we can
remove the duplicated specs for poll question answers.
We need to replace ".title=" by ".title_#{locale}=" in one place because
for some reason globalize builds a new translation record when using the
latter but it doesn't build one when using the former.