I know the syntax highlighting for code blocks is disabled on superuser. Do we want it disabled here as well?
It seems to me that the large majority of the time a code block is used is for log fragments or configuration fragments. Most of the time it seems like the syntax highlighter doesn't seem to handle these blocks of text and just makes things look ugly with all the various colours.
After seeing some examples I'd like to syntax highlighting turned off by default and if a poster wants it on they should be asked to specify what language the code block is on. Although highlighting might work well on SO, from what I can see the language detection is a long way from perfect for the stuff being posted on SF.
Shell scripting plays a big part in Unix system administration, and it would be nice if syntax highlighting was enabled for this sort of code block.
An personally, I like the idea of syntax highlighting for log fragments, or Apache Configuration fragments, etc, as long as the highlighting works correctly. Although the syntax highlighter doesn't always work correctly.
It would be nice if we could provide hints to the syntax highlighter, as proposed at syntax-highlighting-language-hints.
You can always use <pre> tags to get the code style without the actual syntax highlighting if you want. Although perhaps that should be the default for SF.
There should be
no syntax highlighting here
even of things like printf("%i\n")
It might be useful to some people, but only if the highlighting follows some standard - is there one?
For those it would not be useful for, would there be a problem? Is there an increased performance hit compared to the existing parsing?
My vote is to keep it simple by keeping Syntax Highlighting off. If you want it, you can always copy/paste into your text editor of choice, using your preferred color scheme. (Everybody else's colors are stupid... To everybody else)
It appears this can now be addresses by manually specifying the language.
