Query about viewing web pages.

[phaedrus]

Hi guys,

I have a problem with online newspaper pages that contain long
paragraphs of nested comments.

Whenever I post a comment, the page reloads with new comments people
have submitted since I last did a refresh or a post. Now however, as
well as a bunch of new comments, I still have all the old ones some of
which i've read and some not. But these are hard to distinguish.Very
often, I'm half way through an item before I recall I've read it
before. And of course, the longer and more complex the page becomes,
the worse the problem.

I need some way of 'graying out' the already-red comments, so the
unread ones can stand out and I can spot them easily. I don't want the
pre-existing comments erased completely since some of the new ones may
refer back to them.

I haven't seen a browser that supports this feature so I'm going to
have to tackle it by writing a C program but someone on another group
said I should consider Perl first as it's far more suitable. Any
suggestions as to the best way to approach this task? Thanks!

 

[phaedrus]

I would recommend using the GreaseMonkey Firefox extension.

I can't say I've heard about it. A bit of digging reveals it sounds
promising, though. I'll make additional enquiries in a more
appropriate forum.
Many thanks for the steer.
PK.

 

[Jürgen Exner]

I have a problem with online newspaper pages that contain long
paragraphs of nested comments.

Whenever I post a comment, the page reloads with new comments people
have submitted since I last did a refresh or a post. Now however, as
well as a bunch of new comments, I still have all the old ones some of
which i've read and some not. But these are hard to distinguish.Very
often, I'm half way through an item before I recall I've read it
before. And of course, the longer and more complex the page becomes,
the worse the problem.

I need some way of 'graying out' the already-red comments, so the
unread ones can stand out and I can spot them easily. I don't want the
pre-existing comments erased completely since some of the new ones may
refer back to them.

I'm not sure what you are looking for.
Are you looking for a server-side solution, which presents a different
HTML page upon every visit? Or are you looking for a client-side filter,
which highlights changes between visits to a particular page?
And how do you suggest the tool to differentiate between old comments
that you already read and old comments that you did not read? The tool
can hardly know where your eyes went on the screen.

jue