What are the potential security risks of allowing HTML input in PHP forms?

Allowing HTML input in PHP forms can pose security risks such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, where malicious scripts can be injected into the website and potentially steal sensitive information or perform unauthorized actions on behalf of the user. To mitigate this risk, it is important to sanitize and validate user input to strip out any potentially harmful HTML tags and attributes before displaying it on the webpage.

// Sanitize and validate HTML input
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = strip_tags($user_input);
// Use $clean_input in your application to prevent XSS attacks