Marking code blocks fragments bold / italic

Spec
10

Remember that a Markdown and CommonMark code block is actually tree features (or behaviors, or processing options) rolled into one:

  1. Choosing a monospace font;
  2. Suppressing white space normalization, ie SPACE and EOL are taken “literally”;
  3. Suppressing parsing (ie CommonMark markup is not recognized).

In SGML/HTML/XML these can be “chosen” independently:

  1. The font can be selected by any old style style sheet language, from DSSSL (yay!) over CSS (yawn!) to XSLT/XSL-FO (yuk!), or just use <code>;

  2. White space handling can be influenced by using a xml:space attribute or <pre> element;

  3. Parsing suppression is the purpose of marked sections, usually “CDATA sections” in XML: <![CDATA[ … ]]>.

Maybe an extension of the code block syntax in CommonMark could allow to choose from these three options independently, too? (Right now, I can only think of some incantations in the info string …)