A quickie:
Would it be possible, when viewing things in CODE tags, to have comments appear as a different colour?
(This could be up to each user, of course, or perhaps per page? I'm not sure how it would affect the obfus, you'd probably want to turn it off for those, right?)

Thoughts? Comments? Flames?

- Superlman

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Feature request: Colourful comments?
by stefan k (Curate) on Sep 06, 2001 at 17:16 UTC
    If this feature will be built in it should be real syntax highlighting. Probably it would be themeable in it's colors to match the different PM themes.

    Did I mention that I'd appreciate this? Well, I'd do :)

    Update: This was already discussed: Code Highlighting in the code tag But without any results as it seems.

    Regards... Stefan
    you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion

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Re: Feature request: Colourful comments?
by MrNobo1024 (Hermit) on Sep 06, 2001 at 18:33 UTC
    This sounds like a good idea, but it's not always easy to tell what is a comment. See merlyn's node "On Parsing Perl" for details.

    -- MrNobo1024

    s]]HrLfbfe|EbBibmv]e|s}w}ciZx^RYhL}e^print

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Re: Feature request: Colourful comments?
by trantor (Chaplain) on Sep 06, 2001 at 21:33 UTC

    I don't think it's a good idea, and I'll try to explain why. The same reasons essentially apply for complete syntax highlighting.

    It would be neeed to enforce that inside <CODE> elements one could type Perl code, and Perl code only. Otherwise the highlighting would be just noise. I've just used it to enclose HTML for example, where # is not a comment character.

    Coloring in HTML is done through lengthy <FONT COLOR="#RRGGBB">...</FONT>, this would make pages longer with subsequently longer downloading times. It's certainly a minor problem now, thanks to style sheets in HTML 4.0.

    It's probably unnecessary for short snippets, whereas for longer one it's always possible (and quick) to download the code and use the editor of choice. It's what we usually do anyway, when we need to take a deeper look at the code and maybe run it.

    It would spoil some obfuscated code, or worse, it would not work correctly with it.

    Just my two cents. No flames, no criticism :-)

    -- TMTOWTDI

    Update: thanks to John M. Dlugosz for pointing out the STYLE attribute approach to colouring text in modern HTML

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      Coloring in HTML is done through lengthy <FONT COLOR="#RRGGBB">...</FONT>,

      Actually, the FONT tag has been deprecated or dropped by the W3C. If you validate as HTML 4, you will get kicked for using it.

      The proper way to do it is with a STYLE attribute on whatever group (e.g. a P) that you want it to apply to, or SPAN if you just need for grouping.

      But I would not use (lengthy) literal colors all over the place. I'd set up styles and then refer to those by name using the CLASS attribute.

      PM seems to filter out a STYLE attribute, though. I see it in the edit box but not if I view source for the preview.

      The style sheet itself will have its own URL and is not downloaded with every page.

      it's always possible (and quick) to download the code and use the editor of choice. It's what we usually do anyway, when we need to take a deeper look at the code and maybe run it.

      I agree, that's the best solution for real listings.

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Re: Feature request: Colourful comments?
by rchiav (Deacon) on Sep 06, 2001 at 19:03 UTC
    Someone might want to look at Scintilla if they're going to do this. Their lexer is more geared for editors, but there's some other projects aimed at trying to make Scintilla more flexable. If it's suggested to them, they might be open to making a lib that will take the text and a language and return colorized html. They could already have it.. but I haven't followed their progess very closley. It might even be structured in a whay that it could be easily extended for perlmonks use.

    Rich

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Re: Feature request: Colourful comments?
by Tetramin (Sexton) on Sep 27, 2001 at 20:27 UTC
    I happen to have syntax highlighting done with a perl script once ago. You can put the code into a textbox and out comes colorized code. The style and the colors are inspired by textpad but since the output is formatted with <span class=xy> tags it is easy to have different colors. As a newbie I would love to contribute my few lines of code.
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