Is it possible to use an <a> tag within a <pre> tag?

Question

Im working with some legacy code that generates a given message on a webpage but surrounds it with a <pre> tag - I was hoping to put a link (anchor tags) within it like this:

<pre>User created successfully - <a href='/View/User/17'>click here</a> to view the users profile</pre>

But I think because its a <pre> tag it ignores tags within it. Is there any way around this?

APOLOGIES

Im really sorry to have wasted everyone's time - the reason why it was happening was due to the fact that I was using ModelState.AddModelError (in ASP.NET MVC) to set the error message, which automatically HTML encodes the message you give it (I used Chrome's element inspector which shows the HTML decoded version, hence the confusion)

Answer 1

Phrasing content (such as <a>) is allowed in <pre>.

References:

• W3C: The <pre> element