Change purple_markup_html_to_xhtml() to convert <strong> tags to <span style="font-weight: bold;">, as the latter is what is used in XEP-0071 http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0071.html#examples We use this function in two other places outside of Jabber: libpurple/log.c and pidgin/plugins/gtkbuddynote.c. I don't think this change will negatively affect either of them, because the generated xhtml will only be viewed by Pidgin, and Pidgin understands the span tag. Thanks to Thomas Bohn for emailing meebo about this.