To color text, or not color text

I mentioned the other day that I was going to revisit the text parsing engine of POP Forums and essentially start over. What a difference that made. In less than a day I turned years of crap upon crap into something much leaner, about a third less code. I got there with about twice the unit tests that I originally had. Around a dozen regular expressions took care of all of my line break and blockquote woes that I kind of eluded to in that last post. I started with the first test, and kept working through them until they all passed. I don't know if it's the most elegant thing ever, but it appears to work. I dropped it into two of my production sites and so far, so good (yeah, TDD makes you that confident).

Since this entire exercise is really about arriving at the next version, I can now think about features. The big question is, do I want to endeavor into the world of allowing different text colors, and perhaps text sizes? On the pro side, it would be something other forums already offer. That's the entire list for the pro side.

On the con side, I have to deal with different implementations of rich text editors, decide how best to present the changes (span tags, probably), decide if the various heading tags make the most sense, and above all, know that I'll be responsible for some forum where I see something like:

o my f***ing god!!!!!!!111 u suX0rZ!!!!111

One must be a responsible code monkey, after all!

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