Two improvements have recently been pushed to RSTA. First, inline CSS is highlighted in HTML, PHP, and JSP files. Previously, inline CSS was rendered as plain text; now it’s rendered just as if CSS highlighting were enabled.
CSS Highlighting in an HTML document
These days, TokenMakers for web-based languages are each actually highlighting several languages – JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and possibly JSP/PHP. This means in documents with lots of inline scripts and styles, it’s not immediately obvious with a visual scan what you’re looking at with syntax highlighting alone. Which brings me to the second new feature – secondary language highlighting. When enabled, this allows TokenMakers to specify Tokens as belonging to specific “secondary” languages. When secondary language highlighting is enabled, such Tokens are painted with a special background color. This results in regions of code such as JavaScript and CSS blocks to be painted with a different background, as seen in the screenshot above. It can be extra useful when viewing generated HTML with poor formatting:
Secondary Language Highlighting – JS and CSS in HTML
The bad news is, this feature comes at a fair performance penalty (since the background is painted for each individual Token, not for the entire region at once). On good hardware (especially Windows machines) this shouldn’t really be a problem, but for this reason, this feature is disabled by default. To enable and query it, use these methods in the RSyntaxTextArea class:
public boolean getHighlightSecondaryLanguages(); public void setHighlightSecondaryLanguages(boolean highlight); public int getSecondaryLanguageCount(); public Color getSecondaryLanguageBackground(int index); public void setSecondaryLanguageBackground(int index, Color color);
There are currently three secondary language backgrounds, which I’m assuming is a sufficient and practical number until someone proves otherwise. 🙂 The Theme DTD and API have been updated so that themes specify the background colors for secondary languages as well.