This template is to help facilitate the displaying of variable names (in mathematics, computer source code, etc.) with the semantically correct <var>...</var>, which also renders the variable in italics, as is customary. This method is preferred to simply italicizing, for accessibility, content/presentation separation, semantic Web, and metadata reasons; XHTML's <var> element has semantic meaning, while simple italicization does not.

Example:

{{var|username}}

outputs

<var>username</var>

which renders as:

username

compare to simple ''username'' italicization:

username