A Curious Animal

There are two kind of syntax hightlighters for a web place, those who run on the server side and those who run in the client side.

The first group depends on your server, if you are using plain HTML pages or any CMS or blog system (Wordpress, Drupal etc). When you request a page, the server side code highlighters colorizes your text in the appropriate way and returns it to the clients.

In the opposite, the client side code highlighters are, basically, a pice of JavaScript code that is loaded with your page, scan your code and highlight the specified blocks. All the work is done by the client, the browser.

In summary, this post is all about to point to the Alex Gorbatchev syntax highlighter a very nice client side solution, which among other things has:

• Support for a great number of languages: C, Java, Bash, XML, Perl, PHP, ...
• Collapsible code option
• Line numbers
• Wrap lines
• ...and many more