I don't think the two tags are the same.

• The <code> element is a standard part of HTML and doesn't provide highlighting. It's an inline element, and can be used in more situations than just syntax highlighting.
• <syntaxhighlight> on the other hand is a specific MediaWiki extension and is a block element. The HTML equivalent is <pre>, which is used in some situations.

The fact that syntaxhighlight is a long word to write out has come up previously (e.g. T314918, T251116) and generally ideas to shorten it have been declined because it's possible to create a template to wrap the tag to make it easier to type.

In T334606#8777978, @Samwilson wrote:

I don't think the two tags are the same.

• The <code> element is a standard part of HTML and doesn't provide highlighting. It's an inline element, and can be used in more situations than just syntax highlighting.
• <syntaxhighlight> on the other hand is a specific MediaWiki extension and is a block element. The HTML equivalent is <pre>, which is used in some situations.

The fact that syntaxhighlight is a long word to write out has come up previously (e.g. T314918, T251116) and generally ideas to shorten it have been declined because it's possible to create a template to wrap the tag to make it easier to type.

Why not make syntax an add-on over <code> tag. We also save HTML5 semantic yes.

I don't think extensions should hijack existing HTML elements like that. For inline code highlighting, the inline property can be used, e.g. <syntaxhighlight lang="php" inline>…</syntaxhighlight>.

In T334606#8781011, @Samwilson wrote:

I don't think extensions should hijack existing HTML elements like that. For inline code highlighting, the inline property can be used, e.g. <syntaxhighlight lang="php" inline>…</syntaxhighlight>.

Why not?:) We can use smth like <code lang-id="php"> for example.

There is another ticket discussing mapping triple ` to syntaxhighlighting, which I think is a much better idea honestly. It matches expectations that people have of other wiki link languages such as markdown, it's short, not language specific and unlikely to conflict with existing wiki text. The inline variant with ` might be a bit more difficult to introduce, but worth an investigation.

However, adding wikisyntax is difficult, especially if that syntax has to map to an extension (I don't think we have anything like that right now).

In T334606#8781169, @TheDJ wrote:

There is another ticket discussing mapping triple ` to syntaxhighlighting, which I think is a much better idea honestly. It matches expectations that people have of other wiki link languages such as markdown, it's short, not language specific and unlikely to conflict with existing wiki text. The inline variant with ` might be a bit more difficult to introduce, but worth an investigation.

However, adding wikisyntax is difficult, especially if that syntax has to map to an extension (I don't think we have anything like that right now).

T286569

<syntaxhighlight> has an inline function, which if absolutely necessary, you can wrap into a template. Right now Template:Code does that. I don't think this is a great task to take on.