Before Org mode’s Babel, one popular approach to publishing code in HTML was by using ‘:textarea’. The advantage of this approach was that copying and pasting was built into browsers with simple JavaScript commands. Even editing before pasting was made simple.
The HTML export back-end can create such text areas. It requires an ‘#+ATTR_HTML’ line as shown in the example below with the ‘:textarea’ option. This must be followed by either an example or a source code block. Other Org block types do not honor the ‘:textarea’ option.
By default, the HTML export back-end creates a text area 80 characters wide and height just enough to fit the content. Override these defaults with ‘:width’ and ‘:height’ options on the ‘#+ATTR_HTML’ line.
#+ATTR_HTML: :textarea t :width 40
#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
(defun org-xor (a b)
"Exclusive or."
(if a (not b) b))
#+END_EXAMPLE