Simon Willison’s Weblog

Can you mark items on a website as ’unread’ without cookies?

20th October 2012

My answer to Can you mark items on a website as ’unread’ without cookies? on Quora

It’s not very exciting, but CSS will let you set different styles for visited vs unvisited links and the technique has worked reliably since the mid 1990s.

Posted 20th October 2012 at 1:44 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican - 9th November 2025
Video + notes on upgrading a Datasette plugin for the latest 1.0 alpha, with help from uv and OpenAI Codex CLI - 6th November 2025
Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex - 6th November 2025

This is Can you mark items on a website as ’unread’ without cookies? by Simon Willison, posted on 20th October 2012.

cookies 27 html5 83 javafx 3 javascript 724 web-development 169 quora 1005 frontend 19

Next: How does a front end developer avoid getting blamed?

Previous: How should one go about designing a simple web based collaborative text editor?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe