The <code> Tag
Software code warriors have become accustomed to a special style of text presentation for their source programs. The <code> tag is for them. It renders the enclosed text in a monospaced, teletype-style font like Courier, familiar to most programmers and readers of O'Reilly books such as this one.

This following bit of en<code>ed text is rendered in a monospaced font style by Netscape, as shown in Figure 4-8:

The array reference <code>a[i]</code> is identical to

the pointer reference <code>*(a+i)</code>.

You should use the <code> tag for text that represents computer source code or other machine-readable content. While the <code> tag usually just makes text appear in a monospaced font, the implication is that it is source code, and future browsers may add other display effects.[2] For example, a programmer's browser might look for <code> segments and perform some additional text formatting, like special indentation of loops and conditional clauses. If the only effect you desire is a monospaced font, use the <tt> tag. Or if you want to display the programming code in rigidly formatted monospaced text, use the <pre> tag.

[2] None of the popular browsers format <code> segments as a text processor might. Rather, use the <pre> tag in conjunction with <code> to achieve programming code-like display effects.