Yeah, there are only about 8 good ones that are really distinctive, and then after about 20 you can get into some hairy situations. It's not that bad though because usually an off-green is next to an off-red or something. It's only bad when a color and two of its off-colors are all close. I might have it wrap after 10 but add a hover feature that will pop up the contributor's name.
You've seen the IBM work on this sort of thing, right?
No. Please inform.
Should we ever expect it to show the rendered text with these markers, instead of the raw? Cause that'd be outta sight...
My comrades and I have discussed this and it is definitely on the table. It seems that the parser would have to (and maybe it already does some of this) report when it was processing a token and also when it was about to display some text. When it was about to throw the text on the page the extension could wrap it in the appropriate color span. I have never looked at the parser so I don't know if that would be feasible.