Reminds me of my college note taking practice. I used to take notes with about 3-5 different color pens, and my friends used to be puzzled about it (it sure looks weird to swap between pens often).
I used to reply that the color pens made it easier to keep context such as what teacher said was important, what I found difficult, when in the note I had an "aha!" moment, side comment from me, Q&A asked by student during lecture, or how certain things written down now is related to the point made earlier/later in the lecture/notes.
Text (note) is the content but our (at least mine) attention are not really made for plain text. There's so much more you can play with visual information.
Tangential but you are the exact target audience for those pens that were popular in the 2000s, where it was 4 colored ball points combined into one pen.
I still remember my math undergrad notes from years ago: definitions had a prefix Def circled red, theorems -- Th in blue, examples -- Ex in green. Made it much easier to review my notes before midterms / exams.
I like your thinking. I want to apply it to my own writing, as in rendered HTML rather than code.
As an example, imagine writing an eyewitness report about something that happened. There are facts that can be backed up with primary sources, then there is one's own hearsay. The hearsay might be important for telling the whole story, however, it is only hearsay. It has less value than something that can be proven with other sources. So maybe there is a suitable colour for that.
I can mark up my HTML with articles, sections, asides and the rest of it, so that everything is very well structured, and yet none of that is visible - I might as well go for a 'sea of divs'. If I mark HTML up with classes, for example 'hearsay', then I can use that to do some colour things.
Where I speculate or advance a hypothesis, I can use different colours again.
Same with too much detail, I can put that in a colour that can make it easier for the reader to skip, furthermore, I can put that behind details/summary elements.
I need not tell the reader what the significance of the colours amounts to, however, if done well, it can be made to work without the reader knowing why, or needing to care about that. There is going to be an art to this, and pulling it off will require work, but I think it is fully doable.
Some languages - human languages, natural or constructed, not programming languages - have ways of expressing the source of a piece of information, such as whether it is a known fact, something you have personally observed, or just an idea you are throwing out there for instance, using grammar or extra signifying words.
I’ve often thought about stealing some of these techniques for note taking as it would be really useful to have extra context without having to write it all out longhand.
Check out lojban attitudinals for one example along these lines if you are interested. There are natural languages that do this as well but I can’t remember any specifics off the top of my head
Whenever I jump into excel or any spreadsheet app, light light blue is user input and light light red / pink / salmon is final formula output. Makes it so much easier.
I used to reply that the color pens made it easier to keep context such as what teacher said was important, what I found difficult, when in the note I had an "aha!" moment, side comment from me, Q&A asked by student during lecture, or how certain things written down now is related to the point made earlier/later in the lecture/notes.
Text (note) is the content but our (at least mine) attention are not really made for plain text. There's so much more you can play with visual information.