It may be better to use <code> than <pre> to display inline code, for two reasons:
- it’s treated as inline
- the semantics of
<code>are a much better match than<pre>
But definitely use CSS classes (as @Blender points out).
There’s a caveat: <code> doesn’t escape <> brackets, so if you want to display HTML then you have to manually escape brackets as < and >. (which you should really do anyway; tags in HTML really should be clearly distinguished from data)