My main concern with that sentence "If you think you're going to use pre tags..." is it talks only to the few who would have thought of using pre tags here, or at least KNOW what a pre tag does. To tell you the truth, if I hadn't read that sentence on perlmonks so often, my knowledge about a pre tags would still amount to zero.

That sentence should simply be "Use code-tags for code and data". Not as clever or witty but to the point.