Question

I want to display HTML in a webpage. I’ve wrapped in a code block but the last two lines still execute/render. What am I doing wrong?

<pre><code> div {background: brown;} div.bluebg {background: blue;} <div>default brown background</div> <div class='base'>blue background</div> </code></pre> 

The last two lines were wrapped in div tags. I notice stackoverflow strips them out. I don’t want to strip them but modify I guess with < and >. Is there a listing of tags that should be modified to render them in a webpage? Is there an online program that can convert these to the above syntax?

Answer 1

I do not think [those tags] mean what you think they mean.

<pre> allows you to preserve white space and line feeds. <code> allows you to semantically indicate that code is being displayed on your page. Both have some default styles (such as applying a fixed-width font), but neither one does anything to escape <, >, &, or ', so any unescaped HTML code you put in between those tags is going to be processed as HTML. You’ll have to use <, >, &, and ". Here’s a page where you can paste in text and have it escaped: http://accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/quick-escape/