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I'm not sure whether backquotes in titles are supposed to work, or whether they don't currently work, or whether they shouldn't be used. See this question for an example. I know that the math stuff does work, but what about backquotes?

Update

I would really like to turn this into a feature request. It's been over 2 years now and I just don't go along with the arguments of @Shog9 or that of Jeff Atwood in this answer.

The question remains: Why is MathJax supported in titles, and a simple code environment not? We are mainly a programming site and yes, we deal with a lot of function names in titles. MathJax could in the worst case be misused to create a typewriter effect for indicating code and this is surely not intended.

For me, the argumentation for dismissing this feature is very strange, compared to how much it would add to the readability:

enter image description here

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  • Related meta.SO question. – J. M.'s ennui♦ May 7 '13 at 10:32
  • As JM said, the current stance is that it is not supported. However, it has been 3 years since Jeff Atwood wrote that answer and Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have grown tremendously in that time and they've greatly revamped their servers and processing power. Several requests that were once closed as "too heavy on the servers" were implemented last year. If you think this will be useful to have in our question titles, then I recommend that you convert this to a feature-request to ask that it be implemented (at least here), and I'll forward it to the devs – rm -rf♦ May 7 '13 at 17:11
  • @rm-rf I have no preference as to whether they're supported or not, but I wanted to know whether to remove them when editing a title, and couldn't find an answer... I'll leave it for now. – cormullion May 7 '13 at 17:26
  • I enthusiastically support @harlirutan's proposal for making back-quote formatting be supported in titles. – m_goldberg Aug 18 '15 at 1:06
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No Markdown formatting works in question titles. Remember, these are displayed in many places where such formatting would just have to be stripped anyway; the added complexity just isn't worth it.

Nothing prevents you from using backquotes to delimit code in titles if it suits you, but they won't affect how the title is rendered.

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I personally prefer not to see backquotes in titles. My dislike of them is so great that I can not hold myself back from removing them whenever I see them used.

Inline MathJax can often be used in a title to get formatting reasonably similar to what Markdown would do in a question body. I would try to do it that way.

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  • But you now that you wouldn't see backquotes in the title, right? It is about marking function-names properly. I have added a screenshot to the original question. – halirutan♦ Aug 18 '15 at 0:54

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