Been lurking for a few months now, and witnessed all the fun and games with the US election. Now that is out of the way and the FreeWorld is a safer place, I thought I would cough up my 15 bucks and and contribute to the community.
I assume it’s not the QUOTE bit that’s confusing you, so:
The CODE tag preserves formatting and spacing, so you can post programming code and not lose any whitespace formatting, which makes it more readable. The PHP tag is a special case of the CODE tag, which not only preserves whitespace, but color-codes keywords, comments, variable names and the like.
To elaborate on that last: PHP is a programming language, and in fact the language that this board was written in. Because of this, the programmers thought it was pretty important, and so included a special tag for it. All of the color-coding is based on how PHP would interpret the code. In your particular case, it thought that your apostrophes were single-quotes, and apparently PHP interprets text enclosed in single quotes in some special way, so it colored that text differently.
Sure – the same element that is used for phloridating water, to prevent tooth decay!
(It’s also the only element that will react with the noble gases: Xenon hexaphloride was discovered back in the 1960s. The rare mineral Kryptonite is Krypton n-phloride – the hexaphloride being green, the pentaphloride red, and so on.)
Welcome Calabi. Are you sure you’ve been lurking for months? I would think that you could have guessed that telling us to “ignore” something would only entice us to see what it is about. It’s the nature of this board.