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https://stackoverflow.com/help/formatting
Like code blocks, code spans will be displayed in a monospaced font. Markdown and HTML will not work within them. Note that, unlike code blocks, code spans require you to manually escape any HTML within them.
Really?
It seems that I can safely write <blink>test</blink> <marquee>test</marquee> without any manual escaping.
The help text is clearly incoherent.
Markdown and HTML will not work within them.
Correct for backtick-delimited spans; incorrect for <code> spans, and of dubious relevance anyway, as they work like all other HTML tags. Behold Markdown bolding and HTML strikethrough here: Testing
Note that, unlike code blocks, code spans require you to manually escape any HTML within them.
Totally wrong for backtick-delimited spans; correct for <code> spans. Contradicts what was just said, since any context in which you can't use HTML, you certainly don't have to escape it.
<code> tags, and neither one of those covers backticks (except for that one part where they say "inline <code> span"... yeesh), even though the latter is mentioned in the backtick section of that article. If you read the whole article, the incoherence becomes even more pronounced. It is very confusingly organized with lots of ambiguous terms.
"Code span", in this context, means this:
<pre><code><blink>test</blink></pre></code>
Which renders as:
testSo to preserve the HTML you need to replace "<" with "<":
<blink>test</blink>