Pre Tags Stop Working When Reopening within Textarea

[glassfish]

The pre tags:
 

<pre></pre>

get saved in the database like in the above shown example. Though, when reopening them within a textarea they stop working.

For example:
 

<pre><h1>The Headline</h1></pre>

becomes:

The Headline

within the textarea.

 

The Questions:
What happens here?

How to solve it?

Edited October 3, 2014 by glassfish

[AndrewCarter]

Best thing is to convert the offending characters to HTML entities. Being inside 'pre' tags doesn't mean that the browser is no longer parsing your code as HTML, it has to look for the close tag after all!

Try something like this:

 

 

<pre><h1>Hello World</h1></pre>

If you're using PHP, you can do something like this:

echo '<pre>' . htmlentities('<h1>Hello World</h1>') . '</pre>';