Can we activate syntax highlighting for code blocks based on the question's tags?

Question

I think it is time to revisit the syntax highlighting question. There is a similar request that suggests using HTML comments to activate highlighting for specific posts. I would rather implement something like we have over on SO and U&L where syntax highlighting is activated according to a question's tags.

So, if a question is tagged as bash, any <code></code> blocks in the answer get bash highlighting. If it is tagged as perl, the questions get Perl syntax highlighting etc.

I agree with the decision to turn off syntax highlighting on SU by default. It was indeed more often a hindrance than a help. Nevertheless, while many, if not most, SU posts do not need and should not have syntax highlighting, there are many that do. For example, many of these:

• 3,276 questions tagged with bash
• 1,034 questions tagged with emacs
• 6,221 questions tagged with batch
• 1,627 questions tagged with awk

While not all would benefit from syntax highlighting, many would. Since this is already implemented in a tag-dependent manner on U&L I imagine it would be simple to also activate it here. I think that syntax highlighting only for certain tags would improve SU while not affecting the great majority of questions that need no highlighting.

I would also be happy if we could simply allow the HTML comments to prettify code as suggested in the question linked above. Anything that allows me to optionally allow code highlighting, at the very least for my own answers, would be great.

Answer 1

This is now enabled, but there's no default language set, which means you'll need to provide hinting as to what scheme should be used for it to show.

On a few tags, by tag kind of makes sense for obvious reasons. However, in others .. it wouldn't, depending on the content of the post. In order to stay consistent, we're just allowing manual hints as needed, which is a little less confusing to the non-ninjas posting their first few contributions.

Answer 2

As a regular user of SO, U&L, and SU, I somewhat frequently get annoyed that syntax highlighting, even through explicit prettify language codes, is not available on SU. I was not around during the time it was active, but I can well imagine the havoc and confusion automatic inclusion caused. However, we do see a fair amount of "programming lite" questions here (734 python ones, for example, as well as those already-mentioned bash and batch questions, along with those disguised under shell, terminal, command-line, etc.), and while these are admittedly a small portion of the 182,650+ questions currently on the site, those of us that look for and answer them would probably appreciate the chance to optionally add a bit of prettify goodness, at least to our answers, if not into the questions themselves.