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

First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026
Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time - 9th January 2026

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

cookies 27 html5 84 javafx 3 javascript 732 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