I occasionally make layout changes to this blog, hopefully for the better. This time, though, I need my readers' opinion on a change I've been wondering about for some time.

On this blog, I use Prism code syntax highlighting.  For the most part, it works rather well.  The vast majority of my code samples are in either C# or HTML, so the highlighting often looks like this:

public class SampleClass
{
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; } = "My Name";
    
    public ChangeSomething() { ... }
}

<table class="myTable" id="currentTable">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <td>ColumnName</td>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td>SampleValue</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

Personally, I like how clean this looks.  But there's one thing I've wished to have for quite a while now that I don't have yet: line numbers.

In other words, I want my code samples to look like this:

public class SampleClass
{
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; } = "My Name";
    
    public ChangeSomething() { ... }
}

Unfortunately this is a PITA to do in Ghost (my blogging engine) and Prism.  Prism strips out HTML by default, and so I have to escape it by using a plugin and script tags.  While my readers see the code above, I see this:

And when I go to edit that embedded Markdown, I see:

All things considered, this isn't some enormous deal breaker. The problem is specific to HTML or markup code samples; as you'll see above, the C# samples aren't affected at all. However, there is a very real possibility that if I apply the line numbers change to this blog, I will break a great many of my existing HTML code samples.  Or else it simply won't work for older posts without a lot of extra work, and with 150+ posts already published, that is a not-insignificant time investment.

So that's where you come in, dear readers.  I need your opinions to help me decide if I should add line numbers to the code samples on Exception Not Found.

I've got four potential solutions:

  1. Leave the code as is.  Keep highlighting, but no line numbers.
  2. Add line numbers for all possible code samples.  This results in the editor difficulty I described above.
  3. Only place line numbers on samples where it is easy to do so (i.e. don't have line numbers on HTML or markup samples.
  4. Remove the code highlighting library (Prism) entirely.  This has the added benefit of improving this site's performance.

Which of these solutions should I pick?  Tell me what you think about line numbers and highlighting in code samples using the comments below. If the response is clearly in favor of solution 2 or 3, I'll start working out a plan.  Also, if this is another "making a mountain out of a molehill" situation, or if there's another potential solution I'm not seeing, I want to know about those as well.  Just keep the comments civil, please.

Finally, as always, thanks for being the best readers I could ask for.

Happy Coding!