I think it is time to revisit the syntax highlighting question. There is a similar request that suggests using HTML comments to activate highlighting for specific posts. I would rather implement something like we have over on SO and U&L where syntax highlighting is activated according to a question's tags.

So, if a question is tagged as bash, any <code></code> blocks in the answer get bash highlighting. If it is tagged as perl, the questions get Perl syntax highlighting etc.

I agree with the decision to turn off syntax highlighting on SU by default. It was indeed more often a hindrance than a help. Nevertheless, while many, if not most, SU posts do not need and should not have syntax highlighting, there are many that would. For example, many of these:

• 3,276 questions tagged with bash
• 1,034 questions tagged with emacs
• 6,221 questions tagged with batch
• 1,627 questions tagged with awk

While not all would benefit from syntax highlighting, many would. Since this is already implemented in a tag-dependent manner on U&L I imagine it would be simple to also activate it here. I think that syntax highlighting only for certain tags would improve SU while not affecting the great majority of questions that need no highlighting.