Comment 2 for bug 509682

I think what you are referring to here is the HTML markup, rather than the original markup of the document, which is written in Docbook XML. The conversion of the document to HTML is performed by a parser called xsltproc and stylesheets supplied by the docbook-xsl package - the ubuntu-doc team doesn't have the time or the ability to modify the individual HTML markup used by these tools for specific commands. Ubuntu Server users will generally have enough bandwidth to download the few extra characters used by the markup. For that reason I'm closing the bug as "won't fix". If you want to pursue the principle upstream with docbook-xsl, you'll find information here: http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookXslStylesheets