What function can I use consistently to escape possible HTML for editing and display?
Well, I would start with the one called esc_html(). EDIT Longer answer: You should perform sanitization on input, and escaping on output. To sanitize HTML content on input, I would use one of the kses() family of filters – particularly, wp_kses_post(), which will filter all but the HTML tags allowed via the Post Editor. To … Read more