This is self-explanatory
[subbu@earth lib] echo '<h2>foo</h2>' | node parse --html2wt <h2>foo</h2> [subbu@earth lib] echo '<a rel="mw:ExtLink" href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>' | node parse --html2wt <a rel="mw:ExtLink" href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>
Those strings need to be nowikied
Are we sure about the second case (<a>…)? Given that explicit <a> tags aren't allowed in wikitext, Parsoid already encodes it correctly:
echo '<a rel="mw:ExtLink" href="http://www.google.com"&g t;Google</a>' | node parse --html2html
…
<p data-parsoid='{"dsr":[0,59,0,0]}'><a rel="mw:ExtLink" href="http://www.google.com">Google</a></p>Ah yes .. that is true. That said, I think editors find the a-tags disconcerting and the nowiki might serve as a visual cue that it is just text. If the code to handle these scenarios is going to be generic, you can handle it uniformly. If it looks like you have to add special cases to the code for the <a> tag scenario, then don't bother. This is a rare edge case that is not worth the complexity unless someone explicitly demands it.
Change 210712 had a related patch set uploaded (by Marcoil):
T93824: Put escaped HTML tags inside <nowiki>