Don't consider inline code spans as code for the purposes of the quality filter

Question

From my earlier question, Detect attempts at disguising meaningless text as code blocks:

Currently, the quality filter only asks that you have a code block before it will accept your submission of a post containing a jsFiddle link. Without a block of code, the submission is rejected with an instruction.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter what you put in that code block, as long as at least one line of text begins with four spaces to make an indented block of code in Markdown and isn't entirely whitespace. This means as long as you have a non-whitespace code block somewhere in your post, you can submit it with a fiddle link. It doesn't have to be actual code.

The quality filter also considers just having any text surrounded by a pair of backticks to form an inline code span, as sufficient code for a post to be let through.

Given that jsFiddle links typically consist of complete code snippets that span one or more lines of code and would almost invariably benefit from syntax highlighting, it seems in poor form to consider inline code spans as code for this purpose, because inline code spans are typically used to refer to things from code within written prose, as opposed to complete snippets.

Plus, it's an even cheaper workaround: just add one or more pairs of backticks to anything. Add the rampant misuse of backticks for emphasis to that and you get plenty of false negatives which cannot be fixed by somebody else unless they extract the code from the fiddle while also fixing the misused backticks.

Thus, I feel allowing this is counter-productive. If a post linking to a fiddle requires code coming directly from the fiddle in order to be allowed, and that code is usually a complete code sample rather than something that can be referred to mid-sentence, then there's no good reason to consider or allow inline code spans as such. These should be excluded from the filter criteria.

In other words, for something to be considered code for the purposes of the quality filter, it should be in a code block. Just putting text in an inline code span should not be sufficient to pass.

Answer 1

To be honest, I have had my fair share of answers that contain only inline code spans with links to jsFiddle, where the inline code spans actually represent code. Here is one of them. The small fragments of code being represented are context enough that including an entire snippet of code would be unnecessary (albeit probably still beneficial).

Given that inline code spans are relatively trivial to deal with, especially since there's probably going to be only one or two to remove (since that's all you need for the quality filter to let your post through), it probably isn't worth forcing every post to include a great big code block at the cost of legitimate uses of inline code spans. Besides, as already pointed out in my earlier question, it's equally cheap to work around either way.