I’ve spent little time looking at the formatting on my blog.  As the code has gotten longer, it’s gotten unacceptable that tabs and other formatting don’t show up correctly.  A little google-fu and thanks to this blog post:
http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/styling-pre-tags-with-css-code-block/
I’ve reformated 25+ of my posts with more readable code with tabs and the whole bit.  I could go through and reformat everything, but I probably wont.

Anyway, the short and long of it is to use <pre> tags and <code> tags in tandem, which circumvents the problem of escaping all the special characters, including tabs.  Yay for a more readable blog.  (Yes, it happens to be a very quiet Saturday night :).