I was going to commit this patch, but decided to ask for a second opinion.  I think module names in section titles should be marked up with :mod:.

Marking up each and every instance of a module name is not mandatory IMO.  What’s important is that each document title starts with the :mod: construct, so that the HTML titles and index (at /library) be consistently useful.  See for example ast (which also suffers from non-standard markup in its docstring, but that’s another issue).  In addition, there are hierarchy problems in the index.

1. Does the markup make any visual difference?
2. Does the markup affect the index?
3. What do other module docs do?

I notice that 'Tkinter' appears in several section headings. Is it marked? (Is the upper case a holdover that should be lowercased?)

'Turtle' also appears in several section headers. That could be interpreted as a reference to the class rather than the module.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Terry J. Reedy <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
..
> 1. Does the markup make any visual difference?

It does on my browser.  (I wouldn't have noticed it otherwise.) See
http://docs.python.org/dev/contents.html

> 2. Does the markup affect the index?

I don't think so because module names are already in the index.

This is either holdover or title-case.  In either case it should be
fixed.  Note that in some section titles it is lower case and marked
up properly.

> 'Turtle' also appears in several section headers. That could be interpreted
> as a reference to the class rather than the module.

In "Turtle graphics" it is neither -- just part of the name of the
graphics framework.  When it is a name of the class, as in " Overview
of available Turtle and Screen methods," is should be marked up with
:class: IMO.  In "Tell Turtle’s state", I think "turtle" should be
lower-cased.

Eric: any :mod: role never affects the index.  Only the module directive does.

Otherwise, I concur that it's not mandatory to mark up every occurrence of the module name, but it's nice in section headings.

>http://docs.python.org/dev/contents.html
The only thing I see there is the bold-facing of *PEP 3101*.
Is that what you are referring to?

In any case, with Georg's concurrence go ahead with this and any other modules you care about.

I think that using e.g. :mod:`subprocess` in the subprocess page is redundant because there's no need to add a link to the page you are already reading. I'm also not sure that it looks too nice in the headers (iirc the font is different), but I haven't tried to apply the patch and see how it looks.

New changeset 58564aeec8e4 by Ezio Melotti in branch '2.7':
#10385: use the mod role in subprocess docs.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/58564aeec8e4

New changeset 8e8d391eb3eb by Ezio Melotti in branch '3.2':
#10385: use the mod role in subprocess docs.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/8e8d391eb3eb

New changeset f45d1afb952b by Ezio Melotti in branch '3.3':
#10385: merge with 3.2.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/f45d1afb952b

New changeset 5d7e7e7e2e82 by Ezio Melotti in branch 'default':
#10385: merge with 3.3.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/5d7e7e7e2e82

It looked OK and the :mod: role was already used throughout the page, so I applied the patch.