User blog comment:Kirkburn/Syntax highlighting - helping you read and write code/@comment-5558012-20150310000624/@comment-126761-20150310144154

The colours on the light theme will be toned down with tomorrow's site update. There's a few reasons for background colours rather than coloured text - a big one is that it works better across themes (consider blue text on a blue theme), and because of the way wikitext behaves. Wikitext is about blocks of code, while CSS, JS and Lua are much more about what each individual character means.