Return of the yellow

When reviewing bugs filed from feedback on MSDN Feedback site we came across few requests to make <% %>elements yellow again. I was particularly touched by this bug report author's reasoning for the fix:

Benefits: Improved User Interface, Nostalgia

Yes, I also kind of missed yellow coloring which has been in the product since VID 6. We lost yellow coloring as a side effect of code intellisense and coloring in server script blocks. In earlier versions our parser simply considered all <% %>elements to be of the same token class. In order to handle Web Forms better we introduced different classes for different server elements like <%@ and others. Server expressions inside attribute values became part of the attribute value and that also led to loss of the yellow color. In Whidbey attribute value produces a single token during lexing as opposed to earlier versions when we parsed inside attribute values. Boith changes prevented colorizer from rendering some server elements in yellow. While implementing custom element coloring work I realized that since I am already working in this area, it won't take much more time to get yellow coloring back. Here is how it looks like now:

The other issue is that for some reason since VID 6 attribute values without quotes have been colored as 'HTML Attribute Value' (see Tools | Options | Fonts and Colors) while quoted values have been handled as 'HTML String'. Don't ask why, I don't know, it's been like this since I joined the team almost seven years ago. Anyway, this time we decided to eliminate 'HTML String' as confusing and colorize both quoted and unquoted attributes as 'HTML Attribute Value'.

As you may see, your feedback may get postponed but as it accumulates votes or other similar bugs get filed we may still return to it.