Undecorated index entries [and node names] are better because ... FWIW, I agree, at least wrt quotes. This exact issue is why I used @t instead of @code or @samp or something else in the @node names in texinfo.texi when I changed them to use @-commands.
I'm less sure about, say, @emph. That output is not encoding-dependent and presumably the author actually intended to get the markup. The HTML Xref expansion node should list all the "decorations" we do. Thanks, Karl
