User blog comment:Kirkburn/Technical Update: October 26, 2015/@comment-26437440-20151028042008/@comment-3388044-20151028183111

@MZD: I think that’s very much intentional.

It might be that, in the future, Wikia would finesse our options by providing more tick-box options related to syntax highlighting. However, the current binary choice of off or on is better than nothing.

A number of us do a lot of editing and maintenance on a tablet, a platform on which the syntax highlighting simply doesn’t work correctly. So, the ability to turn it completely off is a godsend (by which I mean a Kirkburn-send ;) ).