Syntaxhighlighter

In April 2007 I blogged on the way to colorize source code postings.

...I was thinking how great it would be to have a CSS-based solution so you can put your source code into HTML element, define a few style attributes, and let it automagically colorize everything. wow...

I explored an idea (rather as a fun experiment) of building a DHTML behavior that talks to a server application, passes the code fragment, and replaces the page content with a formatted HTML fragment upon response from the code formatter application.

Today I ran into a Google Syntaxhighlighter that seems to do exactly what I dreamed of and as I can see is available since almost exactly back then, just one month later. It explores a different and a much more "down to earth" idea of parsing the code with regexps. Nice isn't it?