How to post code samples, big or small, in your Dreamwidth posts and comments

As long as I've been using journals or forums online, I've seen variations on the conversation that goes like this:

Isn't there an HTML code that lets you post, well, HTML code?

Oh, yeah, that's the pre tag isn't it? Pre stands for preformatted.

No, that just keeps the lines from wrapping, you're thinking of the code tag.

No, pre just keeps whitespace, and it's not code, it's something else...

What our imaginary friends want is a tag that automatically escapes HTML. And they aren't imagining things, there did used to be such a code, but it's obsolete now. Neither code nor pre are a magic fix. You have to do your escaping manually. ( Read about escaping, pre, code and textarea formatting. This post contains some examples of non-wrapping text that may not display well in all layouts. )