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

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)