HTMLArea puts HTML into the textarea. If you store that as Rich Text, you get escaped versions of special characters that will render in the browser as HTML source code. If you store as HTML+MIME, you lose the formatting cues if you then try to edit the field (only the text content is served to the browser, not the surrounding HTML). Using a text field, you get the literal content of the field back. In the browser, that means well-rendered HTML. In the Notes client, though, you get something only a devoted webhead would love. (Just as an aside, I use two text fields in conjunction with an HTML textarea element, splitting the content among the text fields on submit. That gets one around the 32K field limit. If it weren't for the total summary limit, you could use more.)