Question

How can I show HTML snippets on a webpage without needing to replace each < with < and > with >?

In other words, is there a tag for don’t render HTML until you hit the closing tag?

Answer 1

is there a tag for don’t render HTML until you hit the closing tag?

No, there is not. In HTML proper, there’s no way short of escaping some characters:

• & as &
• < as <

(Incidentally, there is no need to escape > but people often do it for reasons of symmetry.)

And of course you should surround the resulting, escaped HTML code within <pre><code>…</code></pre> to (a) preserve whitespace and line breaks, and (b) mark it up as a code element.

All other solutions, such as wrapping your code into a <textarea> or the (deprecated) <xmp> element, will break.¹

XHTML that is declared to the browser as XML (via the HTTP Content-Type header! — merely setting a DOCTYPE is not enough) could alternatively use a CDATA section:

<![CDATA[Your <code> here]]>

But this only works in XML, not in HTML, and even this isn’t a foolproof solution, since the code mustn’t contain the closing delimiter ]]>. So even in XML the simplest, most robust solution is via escaping.

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¹ Case in point:

textarea {border: none; width: 100%;}

<textarea readonly="readonly">
  <p>Computer <textarea>says</textarea> <span>no.</span>
</textarea>

<xmp>
  Computer <xmp>says</xmp> <span>no.</span>
</xmp>