Are links in Podcasts show notes supposed to be "live"? Most podcasts have show notes that describe the individual episode.  In iTunes, you can see these show notes by clicking on the episode, then clicking on the "i" at the right of the episode description; in the iOS Podcasts app, you can see these show notes by tapping the podcast's "album art" in the Now Playing screen.

Often these show notes are written to include links to web sites, but AFAIK neither iTunes nor the iOS app treat these links as other than plain text; there does not seem to be any way to actually open them.  See for example the screenshot below; notice that in the middle of the paragraph (about five lines down) the words "click here" appear, but are non-functional.



I suppose it is possible that the the responsibility for this rests with the publisher (i.e. maybe they are just copy/pasting text from their website and not properly coding the episode description) but if so it seems to be a universal problem; I've never seen a podcast in which this did work.  It seems more likely to me that neither iTunes nor iOS is set up to handle live links in episode descriptions.

Am I right about this?  Are those links supposed to work?  Or am I just doing something wrong?

Edited to add:  If the answer to this question is "No, those descriptions don't work", is there a better Podcasts app that does handle those as live links?
Apple's podcast specs explicitly discuss how to embed HTML links within the Summary field: 


  Text Encoding
  
  Use plain text UTF-8 encoding for your podcast feed (no markup or HTML, except as described below).
  
  Tag values are limited to 255 characters, except for , which can be up to 4000 characters. Don’t add leading or trailing spaces to your values.
  
  Enclose all portions of your XML that contain embedded links in a CDATA section to prevent formatting issues, and to ensure proper link functionality in the Podcasts app. For example:
  
  &lt;itunes:summary&gt;&lt;![CDATA[&lt;a href=“https://www.apple.com”&gt;Apple&lt;/a&gt;]]&gt;&lt;/itunes:summary&gt;
  


Several popular podcast clients support this —  Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast, among others — ,and I believe Podcasts on iOS does now as well. 

See for example this screenshot from Macstories' review of Overcast:

[