This could revolutionize social news sites. Imagine if the average reddit/digg/slashdot user were to actually read the article he was commenting on first.

I am less than confident that it would significantly affect the inanity of the comments.

I'm thinking you could only allow someone to comment or vote after they've viewed the page by doing the :visited css trick

Replies to other comments ought to still be enabled, because threads don't always stay strictly true to the subject of the original post.

Otherwise, I think that's a pretty clever idea.

Presumably you have to be logged in to be able to comment, so it seems easier to just remember what every user has read.

I prefer looking only at the information that is relevant to the current task. Having everything on one page reduces the time to switch contexts, but increases the effort required to process information in the current context.

Maybe something that made it easy to switch between contexts while preserving information hiding would be preferable. (keyboard shortcuts perhaps)

Good Suggestion. I could create a feature that would hide the news panel when you click on an article link, maybe turn it to a thin orange vertical bar running along the left side? Maybe a toggle preference feature, such as clicking comments above the article expands comments but collapse the article? Definitely things I could work in as user preference choices.

Can you also put the list of links in an iframe of the same size as the article pane?

So that the browser window does not get a scroll bar, and instead you have two scroll bars - one for each pane.

And BTW it's quite possible to have it auto size the iframe using CSS. You should not need to have it fixed.

Set:

HTML, BODY { height: 100%; } Then give the two iframes height's of 100%, and add a padding to the article iframe giving you space for the two orange bars, which you put in place with position fixed (either on top, or on bottom, as needed.)

i.e. if each bar is 10px high, then either do padding-top: 20px; (space for two bars), or padding: 10px 0px; (10 on top and on bottom)

Hope that helps.

Oh, also get rid of the padding/margin around the body.

This is a keeper... thanks!

Yes, thanks a lot from me too.

+1 from me... it's great!

Nice script! I quite like it... though its too early to tell whether or not it'll become my preferred method of hacker newsing.

One big issue (may have been tarkin2's problem), but an easy one to fix, is that news.ycombinator.org also points to hacker news, but your script is only active on .com!

Another thing: is there any way you could set the height of the open comments/article frame to the height of the browser viewport (minus 25px for the header)? this gets rid of the annoying problem of scrolling all the way to the bottom of an article (or comments), and then having to switch focus to the main frame just to scroll to see the bottom of the internal frame.

Thanks for the helpful script!

Thank you dandelany :)

I think I fixed the .org problem. I will take a look at your viewport suggestion soon too.

Easy...simple...I especially like the highlighting of the pages that have been read!

If anybody's up for it (my own CSS/JS skills aren't much use), you could probably build an online, non-Greasemonkey version of this with an app I've been working on: http://feedvolley.com/

(Basically it lets you take an RSS feed and present it in HTML templates, with whatever Javascript/HTML/etc you want. If you have any questions or need any help feel free to email me at [email protected])

I like the idea a lot. The only thing I'd like to see in it is the option of having the sites stacked horizontally instead of vertically next to each other. Maybe I'm just weird but I find it easier to read something when there's two or three lines per paragraph instead of seven or eight. Less likely to get cross eyed and all..

It appears that when there is an article listed with 2 separate links in the title, it then doesn't auto populate the comments panel correctly. Clicking on the comments link for the comments you wish to read works properly still.

Ill get it fixed right away.

Fixed the comments panel bug. The comments panel should load correctly for each article, even after clicking through "More".

Help! I installed it, even restarted ff3, and it displays when i right click on the monkey, but i don't see a change... i'm on 1024x748 if that makes a difference.

hu, I'm not really sure why it wouldn't work. As far as external resources, it pulls jQuery off of the Google AJAX Library CDN. Maybe something is blocking it from getting the jQuery script?

Did you edit the screen size preference in the code? Maybe an extra character got tacked in there or forgotten.

HN community, any ideas?

Most likely NoScript. I had this same problem when I installed it.

You're right. NoScript was blocking googleapis.

I like it, I'm definitely going to use this.

The comments button at the top didn't seem to work on every page.

But works good none the less.

Yeah, I noticed that after click on the "More" link and browsing the second page of articles, that I ran into some problems with the comments bar. Sometimes it takes clicking on the comments link for the article. I will look into fixing this.

Your willingness and enthusiasm to improve on this is greatly appreciated. I'm excited to see the final product!

That is very cool. I always enjoy reading the comments of the article after I read it and this makes it a bit easier. I'll try it out

Great idea, this makes it a lot easier to go from one article to the next. I'll use it, thanks tdupree!

Feedback: color of header is set to orange by default. Should match header.

Could you clarify what you mean?

Once you get enough karma, you can change the color of the orange bar at the top of HN.

It's too bad this doesn't work in Safari with GreaseKit plugin.

I'll look into what's required to make that work.

Dang it, I had this same idea a while back, except with pre-loading the pages so you can mouseover titles on the left and the story instantly pops up on the right.

This would help get through Reddit way faster -- just slowly move the mouse downward and zoom through all the [PIC] and misleading title submissions.

what about split view, this seems very similar and no one has mentioned that?