Well, <code> comes especially useful compared to <pre> when you need to reference some code inline. For example:
<p>Use <code>len(<var>A</var>);</code> do determine the size of an array <var>A</var>.</p>
Like you see, I have used the <var> element to denote variables - actually I've never seen this being done (usually sites who offer colored source code just use font-tags to acieve the effect).
<pre> is for any kind of preformatted text, but it is owerwhelmingly used for computer code. The <pre><code> combination is probably the best you can get.
Althought you can make <code> to behave like <pre> with CSS, it wouldn't be wise, because non-css browsers would see a mess instead of preformatted text.
There is also the <samp> element, which can be used for sample output of programs, like:
<pre> [EMAIL PROTECTED] $ uptime <samp>01:18:12 up 11:01, 1 user, load average: 0.81, 0.59, 0.50</samp> </pre>
question remains... should the uptime-command I gave be marked up as <code> because it's the one-line shell-script I wrote, or as <samp>, because it's the output of Bash? There probably is no correct answer - just to show how hard it can be to distinguish between program and it's output.
Hey, but there's also the <kbd> element for user-entered text, so maybe:
<pre> [EMAIL PROTECTED] $ <kbd>uptime</kbd> <samp>01:18:12 up 11:01, 1 user, load average: 0.81, 0.59, 0.50</samp> </pre>
Well, in real life people probably wont bother to parse the shell output
the way I have done - I think <pre> and <samp> inside there should be enough.
Hopefully you got the idea, that there might be a lot of different semantical
meanings inside one <pre>.
There's one thing bothering me - for some strange reason Opera renders <code> by default in almost invisible color (anyone knows why?)
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