Taw has pointed out that on the old UseMod wiki software, putting text in a <pre> tag disabled interpretation of wiki markup as well as being preformatted. On the Polish wikipedia, this was extensively used for programming examples, where markup interpretation (links, lists, etc) could horribly break the code.

At some point this was changed on the new software, so that to get the same effect you have to also put in a <nowiki> tag inside the <pre> tag; this means the many code examples are broken until they have yet more tags added to them; Taw has requested that the old behavior be restored instead.

Compare old: http://simple.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?SandBox and current: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASandbox

Is there any objection to making this change? Preformatted text with wikicode interpretation has always been available by putting a blank space at the beginning of each line, making <pre> redundant.

The change might require some pages on the English wiki to be altered to remove now-redundant <nowiki> tags.

An additional question: while UseMod's <pre> and <nowiki> tags both suppressed HTML tags (ie, <b>bold</b> appeared as raw text), neither suppressed character references (ie, &#x109; appeared as c-with-circumflex, not as raw text). The current <nowiki> behavior suppresses both tags and char references. Which is preferred?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)