Inline code has always looked like regular code, in a code (monospace) font. Anything really bright and jarring would be highly dependent on the community, and definitely not consistent with the way I see code used in most places on the web.
The issue of syntax highlighting is different; you’d need multiple lines of code to determine which syntax you’re dealing with. Perhaps that was the root of the issue – if you want syntax highlighting you need a block of code, e.g.
var x, y, z; // Declare 3 variables
x = 5; // Assign the value 5 to x
y = 6; // Assign the value 6 to y
z = x + y; // Assign the sum of x and y to z
document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML =
"The value of z is " + z + ".";
A single code element is divorced from all context necessary to do syntax highlighting. You could do a single line of JavaScript though:
"the value of z is " + z + ".";
Which looks like
``` javascript
"the value of z is " + z + ".";
```
So I guess this is about blocks of code versus a word of code.