Might make things easier for us, not harder.
Problems (current and future):
Hard for new users to understand formatting
Instead of having special code formatting, the # Language, bytes <s>old bytes</s> header, etc. this could be an opportunity to make things easier for new users. Basically, you enter code in the code box, your language in the language box, and the explanation where they currently put the whole post.
Results in answers that take up more storage space
To the argument of this taking up more storage space, it could be encoded like this:
{ "lang": "yourlanguage", "bytes": 4, "oldbytes": [444, 44], "postBody": "Blah blah explination" } Minifyed and using small property keys:
{"l":"yourlanguage","b":4,"o":[44,444],"p":"Blah blah explanation"} Compared to a standard answer:
# yourlanguage, 4 <s>44</s> <s>444</s> bytes Blah blah explanation Byte count: 66 to 67. We could use a terser data format than JSON and come out ahead. I think 7 bytes longer answers shouldn't impact our answer limit too much.
Hard for new users to understand golfing
When the code box gets full or has a lot of whitespace, we could show a message telling the user to remove whitespace and otherwise lower their byte count (with lots of links to meta posts.) The current explanation is confusing; at least one user thought they were supposed to optimize their code to make it run faster. When the code entered in the box matches the regex [\s\S]{300,}|([^\t]+\t){5,}|([^ ]+ ){10,}, we can show them a warning:
Note that the tips link goes to tips.
The code box could show a (UTF-8) byte counter for a set of languages known to use UTF-8, like JS, Java, C/++/#, Python, and not show it for others.
We don't get the current formatting / this will break the leaderboard snippet!
The generated Markdown from the metadata and the explanation would be what is currently suggested for answers. It might look like this:
# yourlanguage, 4 <s>44</s> <s>444</s> bytes Your code here Blah blah explanation Same thing. Just with a better user experience, and metadata on the backend that we could use to get cool graphs of how bad Java does, popular language submissions, average scores per tag, average scores per user, and how often people outgolf Dennis.