Consider adding support for arbitrary classes when rendering for sidebar

[spladug]

Not safe for comments, but since mods can edit CSS anyway, allowing arbitrary classes in the sidebar could be useful.

[jamt9000]

It wouldn't need to be arbitrary, just prefixed with some string to provide basic namespacing, the way flair classes are prefixed with "flair-". Then it could be safely used in comments to add custom formatting, emoticons, etc. without needing to abuse links.

[empyrical]

I'm thinking about contributing something like this so links aren't needed for custom formatting/emoticons anymore; would a syntax like this:

[Some text]{classname}

which gets rendered as:

<span class="span-classname">Some text</span>

be appropriate? I'm not sure what a good namespace would be, so I used "span-" as an example.