I just created an issue on Mantis about this, but I wanted to discuss it a little more.
I'm having problems with the HTML pane. Ever since I began using SN, I have had erratic behavior of the html pane on seldom occasions, but because I can't predict when they will hit, I have come to distrust it. On a handful of occasions, I have gone into the pane to add a lot of information, then I come back and find that it has disappeared. it's happened twice the last two weeks. Sometimes, i get a scary prompt asking to erase the content or do I wish to save, and I don't know why the prompt appears because I never clicked on anything to erase or delete anything. Usually, I'm just moving to another item or something. And I have always had the auto-save enabled from the beginning.
Just now, when it happened, I went back into the pane of the item where things got unexpectedly erased, and I pasted in some content again. I went to another item, came back, and it was gone! I did this many times, and it kept disappearing. Then I clicked on "create new html document". A prompt came up warning me that the current content will be erased. Well, there was nothing there anyway, so I said ok. I pasted in the same content again, switched out, came back, and it had disappeared again! Eventually, I clicked around a lot, and I kept pasting in the content, and now it is in there and not disappearing. But I don't really know what I did.
My point is that the whole thing is a little too klunky and non-intuitive for me to trust right now. I really need to be able to trust the html pane because I use it for a lot of long text notes.
One suggestion I have is to have the html pane behave like in most other 2-panes notetaking programs. In most of these programs, there are no options to auto-save or not, or "create" new documents or anything like that. It's just a pane that is associated with each item and whatever goes in there is automatically saved, and saved "live" (that is any changes made are retained constantly; each new character; whenever you go to another item and come back; etc.). Even if the program crashes, or is closed without saving, all of the latest changes should always be retained. I know SN is designed to behave the same way, but the implementation is not as seamless as the other programs.
I would further suggest that the options for the html pane be integrated into the main SN options or toolbar menu. The fact that there are two different options and menus for SN and the html pane make the two feel disjoint, like they are two separate programs or modules. It should be seamless.
Take a popular program like Evernote, for example. There's no option to "auto-save" what you type in a new note. As soon as you type in a note or make a change, that's it, it's done. I never think about it even. The fact that I'm thinking about is due to the distrust. The html pane has to be the same way. I just want to type in there and not have to think about if it was saved.