Confusion around code/literal/monospace markup and elements.

[gmilde]

The markup languages used in Moin support up to four "inline literal" elements (typically rendered in a monospace font) with different semantics:

DocBook           HTML/      Markdown  rST           MoinWiki¹   Creole³
                  Mediawiki
----------------  ---------  --------  ------------  ----------  ----------
<code>            <code>     `text`    :code:`text`  {{{text}}}  
<userinput>       <kbd>      <kbd>     :kbd:`text`
<computeroutput>  <samp>     <samp>    :samp:`text`
<literal>         <tt>²      <tt>²     ``text``      `text`      {{{text}}}

¹according to the documentation

²The "generic monospace" tag <tt> is deprecated since HTML 4.1 and obsolete in HTML 5. Moin's common.css allows representation as <span class=monospace>.

³Creole's {{{Monospace}}} may be generic or source code. Documentation differs and the original specification seems lost.

---

However, the implementation is inconsistent:

Since commit [5ad07c4] (2017-03-29), the Moinpage tree uses the elements, moinpage.code and moinpage.samp.
html_out.py maps them to the respective HTML elements.

html_in.py and markdown_in.py map <code>, <samp>, and <tt> to moinpage.code.

docbook_in.py maps <code> and <computeroutput> to moinpage.codeandto moinpage.span(element="userinput")`.

moin_in.py and moin_out.py map {{{text}}} to moinpage.samp and the backticks to moinpage.code.
This differs from the documentation.

markdown_in.py maps backticks to moinpage.code.

markdown_out.py maps moinpage.samp and moinpage.code to the backticks.

---

Questions

• Should there be separate support for

  • moinpage.code,
  • moinpage.kbd,
  • moinpage.literal (or moinpage.tt or moinpage.monospace),
  • moinpage.samp?

• Should the backticks in MoinWiki markup represent "code", "computer output"
  (samp) or "literal" (generic monospace)?

• Should {{{ ... }}} in MoinWiki markup represent "code" or "computer output" (samp)?

[gmilde]

After some more research and considerations, I prefer a new internal element moinpage.monospace to represent content that should be set in a monospace font without known semantics, i.e. the HTML <tt> tag, rST <inline-literal>, Docutils <literal>, Creole {{{ }}}, and MoinWiki backticks.

HTML output would use <span class="monospace"> employing the already existing rule for .monospace in "common.css".