As long as I've been using journals or forums online, I've seen variations on the conversation that goes like this:
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
Isn't there an HTML code that lets you post, well, HTML code?
Oh, yeah, that's thepre
tag isn't it? Pre stands for preformatted.
No, that just keeps the lines from wrapping, you're thinking of thecode
tag.
No,pre
just keeps whitespace, and it's notcode
, 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. )