Using PRE tags on Code Project

• CODE and PRE tags result in a non-proportional font, which preserves indentation;
• PRE tags give a nice background color (pink-ish by default), very good for contrast; BTW: CODE tags don't, they leave the background white (not so good for color contrast) or turn it blue-ish on forum messages (horrible for contrast), so I don't like them being used in conjunction with syntax coloring at all.
• CODE and PRE tags perform syntax coloring, assuming you add a LANG="some language code" to the opening tag; unfortunately without the change in background, such coloring makes CODE completely unreadable; so PLEASE set LANG=NONE for every snippet in CODE tags. For PRE tags too, the default is LANG='CPP' even in the C# and VB forums; so you really should add LANG='CS' or LANG='VB' to get the keywords recognized correctly (use single or double quotes, and upper- or lower-case).

<pre lang='cs'>    / * the opening PRE tag (normally not visible!) */
 
private static int multiply(int arg1, int arg2) {
    return arg1*arg2;
}
 
</pre>             / * the closing PRE tag (normally not visible!) */

text 	plain text (= no syntax coloring)
cpp 	C++
cs 	C#
vb 	VB, VB.NET, VBscript
java    Java, JavaScript
SQL 	SQL
midl 	Microsoft IDL
asm 	Assembly
msil 	MSIL
xml 	XML
html 	html
css 	CSS

Warning

<b>text</b>   generates bold text (which can not be discerned well at all, so I don't recommend it)
<i>text</i>   italicizes the text
<u>text</u>   underlines the text

<   &lt;
>   &gt;
&   &amp;

Additional Features

1. You can locally change foreground or background color by using
   <span class='emphasis'> or <span class='highlight'>
2. You can change the entire background color by using <pre style='background-color:#DDFFDD'> or some other hex RGB value.
3. You can get the lines numbered automatically, by adding linecount='on'

<pre linecount="on" lang="cs" style='background-color:#DDFFDD'>
private int <b>multiply</b>(int arg1, int arg2) {
    return <span class='emphasis'>arg1*arg2</span>;
}</pre>

  1  private int multiply(int arg1, int arg2) {
  2      return arg1*arg2;
  3  }

Final Words

1. Please use PRE tags for multi-line code snippets, as well as for any tabular data you want to represent.
2. Don't use CODE tags in conjunction with PRE tags. There is no need for them, the PRE tags handle it all.
3. Don't forget to HTML-escape each and every < > & inside a PRE block (unless you actually want an executable HTML tag of course).