7

I noticed that for newly created tags, the code language (which is used when highlighting the code written in a post) is by default set to "none."

screenshot

I get there must be a reason for using that as default language, and I am wondering in which cases it is correct to set it to default, or any other value.

What should I do, before changing the code language set by default? Should I check there are questions/answers showing code snippets, and verify that is the common case for questions using that tag?

Improve this question
  • 7
    Just a note for people desperately trying to find that code language selector: It's a moderator-only functionality. – balpha May 1 '12 at 18:44
  • The question is not about Stack Overflow. As a matter of fact, I am a moderator on Drupal Answers, and I am more interested for that site. The answer is valid for every Stack Exchange site, though. stackoverflow should not be used for this question. – kiamlaluno May 1 '12 at 18:56
  • Yeah, the reasoning should be similar on any site, but the results may indeed differ. – balpha May 1 '12 at 18:59
  • This looks like it would be useful to add to the "tags" section of The moderator cheat sheet (if anyone uses that, that is). – Josh Darnell May 1 '12 at 19:02
7

A tag should only have a language other than "none" if the tag (by itself) is a strong indicator that the so-tagged question and its answers contain highlightable code (this is, for example, not true of the tag in your screenshot).

If that's the case, it should only have a highlighting language other than "default" (the one-size-tries-to-fit-all highlighter) if (obviously) there is a corresponding highlighter and it's fairly certain that a so-tagged question will not contain code in other languages. The tag, for example, has its highlighter set to "default" despite "lang-js" existing, because questions in this tag have a fair chance of containing intermixed JS and HTML.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .