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 backend 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 backend 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