Displaying code in a Xerte page

I want to include (HTML) code samples in Xerte pages, and tried to do this in the editor Source view using a combination of <pre>, <code>, and replacing escape characters with HTML entities (e.g. &lt; and &gt;). The first time I do this, it all looks fine in WYSIWIG editor, and in published project. But if I close the editor, then open it again, the HTML entities are converted back into escape characters and the snippet is rendered. Is it possible to stop this from happening?

Hi
try any of the following:
HTH
Ron

Thanks for the suggestions Ron. I would prefer to avoid <xmp> because it is deprecated. Using <textarea> is a bit of an awkward workaround as have to add readonly attribute, and also specify rows and cols to make it fit the text.
The problem with using the is that they get converted to tag brackets and rendered as HTML when you go back into the editor later. I was hoping there might be a solution to this, I haven't experienced it outside of Xerte.

For now I have found the only way to stop the HTML entities from being rendered is to enclose every single one in a span tag. So for example to show I must write It's quite a slog, but it seems to work.

Isn't it simpler to use <textarea>? I know you rejected this option, but all it needs is "readonly" and the number of rows. The width (e.g. 100%) can be set in the Styles optional property for the page.

Thanks Simon for the styling suggestion, it was the text area width that bothered me most - I didn't like using the cols attribute, and styling it is much easier to work with. I'm just adding the width in a style attribute in the textarea tag.
As long as I remember that empty lines will get stripped out, yes, this is much simpler than using a million span tags!