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HTML might be getting a new type of tag, which… hasn't happened this millennium. Here's the new syntax, and how it works:

I don’t see how riddling your content with markers to do syntax highlighting would fare any better than the span soup approach. I see more benefit in something like `<script type="highlightmap">` + `<pre highlightedby=highlightmap>` in which the browser would do it all by itself (+ is polyfillable)

The benefit is that CSS highlights can't impact layout, so there's a performance benefit to using them rather than spans etc. How would highlightmap work? Some standardised tokenizer?

A serialized object that represents all range information you prebuild on the server (once, preferably)

Seems interesting, but it's still going to riddle the DOM with ranges. You just won't see them. It also increases the change that you'll mutate the content of the element but forget to update the highlightmap.