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Usage
This template is to help facilitate the displaying of variable names (in mathematics, computer source code, wikimarkup in template documentation, metasyntactic variables, etc.) with the semantically correct <var>...</var> tags, which also renders the variable in italics, as is customary. Alternately, editors may use <var>...</var> tags directly in Wikitext to produce identical output.
The use of <var> or {{var}} is preferred to simply italicizing for many reasons, including accessibility, separation of presentation and content, semantic Web, and metadata. In XHTML and HTML, the <var> element has semantic meaning, while simple italicization does not. This template provides a tiny hint of kerning to compensate for the italicization and enhance readability.
"Variable" in this sense may include arbitrary or unknown names or terms, examples of human input, arithmetical variables in equations, etc. This template (and the underlying XHTML) are generally not used if MediaWiki's <math>...</math> tags (or any other stand-alone mathematical markup) are being used.
At times, you may wish to use a serif font. This is especially true when attempting to render single-letter variables like "I" (upper-case "i") and "l" (lower-case "L"), since they are nearly indistinguishable (if at all). In such situations, use the template instead of {{var}}, to make them more distinguishable, like these serif examples: , .