I seem to recall that there is an HTML tag that escapes absolutely everything inside it except the matching closing tag. Kind of like
There is also the XML CDATA:
<![CDATA[stuff that is <tag>never</tag> parsed]]>
Whether this works in an HTML document is probably up to the browser. However, it should certainly work in an XHTML document.
You need to use <pre><code> ... </code></pre>
.
<xmp>
is deprecated and should not be used. See http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/_XMP.html.
<xmp> is the tag you are looking for:
<xmp>some stuff <tags></tags> too</xmp>
But, since it's depricated, the best you can get is <pre>.