Simon Willison’s Weblog

Interesting suggestion

6th July 2002

Micah Sittig made an interesting suggestion in a comment attached to an earlier entry. Micah suggested adding an inert ?lastUpdated=time attribute to links in my blog roll, causing browsers to display links to blogs that have been updated since the last visit in a different colour. I’ve implemented this temporarily, but I’m slightly worried about whether or not this constitutes abuse of the XHTML standard. The additional query string doesn’t break any of the blogs on my blogroll but it is still resulting in fundamentally different page request being sent, which could lead to problems. I’ll leave it for the moment, but I think this may need reconsidering in the future.