I have a varchar(255) field in mysql that is used for displaying the title to a page and I received a request to superscript some characters for a particular title. I updated this title with some html but this doesn't render as expected.
Instead of H2O I get:
H<sup>2</sup>O
Thanks!
This is unrelated to MySQL, the browser chooses to render it this way. Via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML%5Felement#Document%5Fstructure%5Felements
The title element must not contain other elements, only text.
That means you have either htmlspecialchars()ed or htmlentities()ed the text, either on input or on output.
(If you're talking about something like a <h1> tag in the pages <body>, at least. Otherwise the other answerer is right.)