User text inputs, like shortcuts, shouldn't use <code> or span .

If you’ve ever put in a keyboard shortcut into text, say for a blog post or some docs, you probably used <code> , specially if you’re writing in a markdown file because it’s so easy to simply wrap what you want in backticks.

But, if you want to do it properly, you should use the <kbd> element instead, which is the semantic elements for user text inputs, such as shortcuts.

You can use a single <kbd> for a single keystroke (like, "press esc to exit full screen"), but if you have a shortcut that involves multiple keys, you can nest them as well, something like <kbd><kbd>cmd</kbd> + <kbd>c</kbd></kbd> , which you can have output like this: like command + c .

This can present a styling challenge, if you style them to look more like keys like what I did in this post, but you can use kbd:not(:has(kbd)) as you're selector, and you're set!

And if you are writing markdown, you can use HTML in there, so it takes just a few extra keystrokes to get the correct semantics into your work.

Showing system messages and output

By itself, <samp> is used to show quoted text that's being output from your system. For example, if you're describing what an alert a user might see when they try to leave a page without saving.

Leave site? Changes you made cannot be saved

Combining <kbd> with <samp>

There are two situations you might want to combine the two elements:

• Showing text based on user input that's echoed back to them
• Showing onscreen inputs that the user can interact with

If those sound very different, it's because they are!

For the first one, we would nest the <kbd> inside the <samp> , and for second, it's the other way around!

Examples

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