Re: RFC: Adding syntax highlighting to the official documentation

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 31/12/2021 à 14:42, Wols Lists a écrit :
> On 19/12/2021 10:00, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> > For the time being I'm only
> > focusing on HTML output. That has the advantage that
> > if even the contrast does not help, people can use
> > tools to adapt or remove the color scheme if they
> > need to. Echoing James' comment below, while not everyone
> > knows how to do this, I would assume someone with
> > some sort of vision impairment or trouble with colors
> > would. Right?
>
> What you're missing here, is that someone with vision impairment may 
> well have customised their system already. If your scheme messes that 
> up, they won't thank you!


I am not sure I understand what kind of customization
you mean. Right now, all the documentation HTML contains
is

<pre class="verbatim">a big body of code...</pre>

so no custom highlighting is possible.  The proposal changes
his to

<pre class="verbatim highlight">
  <span class="someHighlightingToken>a little bit</span>
  <span class="anotherToken">another bit</span>
  etc.
</pre>

(whitespace added for readability), so now you can
inject custom CSS and have your own highlighting scheme
if you want, or disable highlighting completely.

I would expect someone with vision impairment
to use some browser extension that _removes_ colors.
That won't be messed up. No?



> Can I remind you of the original aim of html - it is to give the END 
> USER the power to control how the document displays. This has already 
> been screwed over enough - such that I regularly find documents that I 
> want to print print something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT to what displays on 
> screen, that I don't think we should be making matters worse ...
>
> You should not be choosing colours, you should be creating a CSS with 
> things like <emphasize> and <code> and whatever all those things are. 
> It's down to the USER how those tags display.


It's great to make things customizable, but if there
are no colors by default, a vast majority of users
is not going to care. Syntax highlighting is a
quality-of-life improvement, not something a typical
user wants to spend time on. Are the customization
possibilites brought by CSS not sufficient? I'm
having trouble getting what your message means
technically for this specific proposal; please
clarify.

Thanks,
Jean