Meaning of the color highlighting in personal Wikipedia articles

I made such a tool. It's a bookmarklet that generates the references in a single click.

You can find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ark25/RefScript

It works with the following newspapers: BBC, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Daily Telegraph, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Canada, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Times of India, Financial Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Ars Technica, TG Daily

The problem (for me) is that I have to teach the script how to handle each website. Another problem the newspapers change their formatting of their pages sometimes, and then I have to update the script. If there would be a W3C standard for presenting the four required fields: title, date of publication, names of the authors and name of the publication, then the script would be much shorter, won't require updates and it would work with any publication that implements the standard.

You can support my request for implementing such a standard here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Engagement_%28Product%29/Process_ideas#Make_life_easier_for_the_editors_-_generate_references_in_one_click

Also check this question: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/59231/unified-standard-for-publication-date-and-author-name-in-newspaper-articles

I looked at the source for a page that contains such examples, and it looks like what they are doing is to use the signature field in the user-profile settings to (below). You can enter markup (the examples I saw were using the deprecated <font> tag and style attribute). Then when you edit a Wikipedia page and add the ~~~~ to add your signature, it will include the specified styles.

Also, svick pointed out a page that gives guidelines on what is an is not acceptable in a customized signature.