The only reasont that I would suggest to use CODE over C is to associate what that special tag means. Say we completely converted all CODE tags to just C tags, and told new users to use a C tag to indicate code. Because of the abbreviation from CODE to C, it's not intuitively obvious that "code" is connected with "C", and thus some might forget it faster than having them introduced via CODE (which is a direct connection, of course). I'm certainly not saying that if the C tag was available that we should go around and flame newbies that use the C tag over CODE. However, you'll have more people using CODE or C over PRE or (even worse) no special tags when displaying code if you tell users that "You can mark code with the special HTML tag CODE (or C for short)...". That code-to-CODE connection is the key to making sure that info sticks. (Yes, I've done waaaay too much on learning styles and the like in my academia days ... ;-)