Formatted as a displayed block. This element is displayed “verbatim”; whitespace and line breaks within this element are significant. The programlistings are usually displayed in a fixed-width font.

Other markup within a programlisting is recognized. Contrast this with systems like LaTeX, in which verbatim environments disable markup recognition. If you want to disable markup recognition, you must use a CDATA section:

<programlisting>
<![CDATA[
This is a programlisting so white       space and line
breaks are significant.  But it is also a CDATA
section so <emphasis>tags</emphasis> and &entities;
are not recognized.  The only markup that is recognized
is the end-of-section marker, which is two
"]"'s in a row followed by a >.

]]>

</programlisting>

Two markup tags have special significance in programlistings: co and lineannotation. A co identifies the location of a callout. A lineannotation is a comment, added by the documentor—not the programmer.

Common attributes and common linking attributes.

These elements contain programlisting: acknowledgements, annotation, answer, appendix, article, bibliodiv, bibliography, bibliolist, blockquote, callout, calloutlist, caption (db.caption), caution, chapter, colophon, constraintdef, cover, dedication, entry, example, figure, footnote, glossary, glossdef, glossdiv, glosslist, important, index, indexdiv, informalexample, informalfigure, itemizedlist, legalnotice, listitem, msgexplan, msgtext, note, orderedlist, para, partintro, preface, procedure, programlistingco, qandadiv, qandaset, question, refsect1, refsect2, refsect3, refsection, refsynopsisdiv, result, revdescription, sect1, sect2, sect3, sect4, sect5, section, setindex, sidebar, simplesect, step, taskprerequisites, taskrelated, tasksummary, td, textobject, th, tip, toc, tocdiv, topic, variablelist, warning.

The following elements occur in programlisting: text, abbrev, accel, acronym, alt, anchor, annotation, application, author, biblioref, citation, citebiblioid, citerefentry, citetitle, classname, co, code, command, computeroutput, constant, coref, database, date, editor, email, emphasis (db._emphasis), emphasis (db.emphasis), envar, errorcode, errorname, errortext, errortype, exceptionname, filename, firstterm (db._firstterm), firstterm (db.firstterm), footnote, footnoteref, foreignphrase (db._foreignphrase), foreignphrase (db.foreignphrase), function, glossterm (db._glossterm), glossterm (db.glossterm), guibutton, guiicon, guilabel, guimenu, guimenuitem, guisubmenu, hardware, indexterm (db.indexterm.endofrange), indexterm (db.indexterm.singular), indexterm (db.indexterm.startofrange), info (db.titleforbidden.info), initializer, inlineequation, inlinemediaobject, interfacename, jobtitle, keycap, keycode, keycombo, keysym, lineannotation, link, literal, markup, menuchoice, methodname, modifier, mousebutton, nonterminal, olink, ooclass, ooexception, oointerface, option, optional, org, orgname, package, parameter, person, personname, phrase (db._phrase), phrase (db.phrase), productname, productnumber, prompt, property, quote (db._quote), quote (db.quote), remark, replaceable, returnvalue, shortcut, subscript, superscript, symbol, systemitem, tag, termdef, textobject, token, trademark, type, uri, userinput, varname, wordasword, xref.