inconsistensy between xhtml and css validators.

I wlidate my page for being xhtml strict compliant.
I have < and > symbols used as is in it; unfortunately, browsers don't 
decode entities inside white-space:pre; or <pre> blocks, so I have to 
use characters themselves.
(btw, as a side question, is there any way to overcome this?).

So then, XHTML validators affirms me that my document is standart 
compliant, but gives me a bunch of warnings, like this:
Line 105, column 82: character "<" is the first character of a delimiter 
but occurred as data

CSS validator, on the other hand, suggests me to validate my XHTML first 
cause it's supposedly not valid. I did validate :)
The error CSS validator finds in my XHTML is on the position of the 
first warning XHTML validator gives...