From the standpoint of programmatically detecting a signature, the above could be cleaned up and work well enough.
Would this mean that if people had a fancy sig, and they changed it, it would automatically update everywhere with this magic tag instead of just applying to new signatures? (Which might be cool)
Downside to that you might have some tricky issue where people change their sig after the fact to be something malicious (For some definition of malicious), and then all the old sigs change without an edit to track it and generally be a vehicle for mass vandalism. (Didn't that use to be an issue on /. ?)
I haven't looked at the actual patch yet, but based on the discussion it seems like this code would allow us to update pages if people's signatures changed? I too am not sure this is a good idea.
I do though support the idea of wrapping signatures in a <sig> markup to make it easier to programatically detect them. That <sig> markup could be rendered as a span with a class="sig" as well which allow those who are just scraping the HTML of the page to be able to detect them as well.
This also makes working out what the state of the page at time X quite hard for things like "Please note that I am being paid to edit by XYZ Inc." that come and go from month to month to be seen.
This is one of my biggest concerns as well.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott