Are edits that only change formatting in text appropriate?

Question

I've seen a number of edits where the only change is to add backticks to single words in a paragraph of text.

For example, the original post might contain something like:

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I'm using the FooBar function (defined in the Fish::Ghoti package) to frobnicate an int variable in my unary tree traversal program.

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and the edit might change it to:

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I'm using the FooBar function (defined in the Fish::Ghoti package) to frobnicate an int variable in my unary tree traversal program.

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The only change is to format individual words as code. (I would have formatted those as quotations, but that would hide the highlighting.)

(I've made changes like that myself, but usually only as part of a larger edit.)

Is this an appropriate edit? If I see it in the review list, should I approve it? Reject it? Flip a coin?

EDIT : Does it really improve the readability? (I suspect that will vary considerably for different readers; some probably prefer the formatting, others find it intrusive and distracting.)

Answer 1

Depends...

Is it a really good post, well-written and attractively formatted, a shining example to one and all of the best that the site can produce... save for the lamentable absence of back-tic'd keywords? Sure, approve it.

Or is it a total eye-sore, rife with misspellings and grammatical errors, code blocks obviously written using 8-space indentation and then somehow pasted in sans-linebreaks, all hung together under the title "C# Pr0blum_?", with the editor's small tweak to the formatting serving little purpose beyond making the gross incompetence of the author even more obvious?

Yeah, reject those.