Make syntax highlighting possible to enable with prettify language codes

Question

On Super User syntax highlighting is turned off. But there are questions on Super User where syntax highlighting can be helpful. Therefore I suggest that syntax highlighting is made possible to enable via prettify language codes (but turned off by default).

Having this feature would mean that a prettify language code, which are certain types of HTML comments, has to be inserted in a post for it to syntax highlighted. For example to syntax highlight a lisp code block in a question the following would have to be inserted before the block:

<!-- language: lang-lisp -->

There are many questions on Super User that would benefit from syntax highlighting. Here are two examples of tags with many questions:

• emacs questions often contains lisp code (on the third page of popular tags).
• bash questions often contains shell scripts (on the first page of popular tags).

A similar request was made on Ask Ubuntu and they got syntax highlighting enabled.

Answer 1

This has been enabled. Highlighting is now on, with no default language set on both SU and Meta SU. VB highlighting has also been enabled for the VB tag.

You'll need to remember to manually add the hints, and you should be good to go.

Also, this is a pretty advanced feature, so please don't expect new users to know about it (as there's really no way for them to discover it). The best way to show them is to just edit so it's hinted appropriately, and leave a comment noting what / why you edited.

Sorry that this took so long to get to - You've got some pretty great moderators here that ensure things don't fall through the cracks.