Unfolder

[undyingking]

Just seen this on lj_nifty  -- it unfolds long comment threads in situ, without taking you away from the main comments page. How cool is that? (Very.)

Not sure LJ will be too keen on this, I believe they do it the way they do to save on database hits. We shall see if they respond...

(I love looking at fancy JavaScripts, it amazes what people think of making them do. See the way he's put the raw gif in?)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

LJ won't mind, because only 0.1% of users will install it.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Good point -- lucky 0.1%!

[chrisvenus]

Well, I can't be bothered to read this but the way I *assume* it works is to rewrite the page to add the new link into it for "unfold" and then when that link is clicked it does a http requesdt to the server for the page, strips out the comments it needs and puts them in the page with magic javascript. The sensible way of doing it will only produce more server load because it is easier to read the comments and so people will do so more often.

That does of course assume they are doing it sensibly. If they're not then they are crazy. And I can't really think of any practical way to do it non-sensibly anyway. :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

That would be the sensible way, but I think that actually it re-requests the whole of the original page as well as the newly-unfolded comments. So some room for optimization!