This will come out as preformatted text (although not text/plain; it is still wrapped with the HTML framing and all that). Call it a convenient way to put up code and other plaintext content without having to indent the entire file. Which would be ... kind of annoying. (Perhaps more than kind of annoying.) This does escape < and & and so on, including things like: </pre> You know I really can't remember the rules that HTML uses to parse the whole thing. I am still vaguely boggled that <textarea> doesn't hork its shoes when some clever bugger puts a </textarea> in the whole thing. (Maybe I will experiment with TWO of them. Who knows!)