Home / About / Engineering / 074: Highlights: select, tap, kept in the browser, drawn without changing the page

Engineering · done

074: Highlights: select, tap, kept in the browser, drawn without changing the page

Highlights: select, tap, kept in the browser, drawn without changing the page

Id074
Statusdone
Kindfeature
Priorityhigh
Created2026-10-16T09:10:00Z
Sourcethe owner, in chat, 16 October 2026: "on the bottom little pane that you added... you shouldn't show the total... It flickers... the percentage that you scroll and the percentage that you read... think of the page as a graph... which articles I read, which I don't read, which articles I highlight... a separate section for articles that are written by agents
Releasev0.12.85
Effortsmall
Fileadmin/engineering/issues/done/074-highlights.md

What is asked

"The highlighting is very important. It's very intuitive." Until now a selection could only be kept as a quote inside a pane note, in four steps, and nothing marked the page.

Scenario

Given a passage selected in an article
Then a Highlight button appears beside it
When the reader taps it
Then the passage is marked and kept in this browser, with its section
And it is still marked after a reload
When the reader taps the marked passage
Then Remove highlight takes it out

Outcome

assets/reader/highlights.js: kept under sgit.highlights.v1 as the exact words, 32 characters either side and the section (the W3C Web Annotation text quote selector), anchored by quote so it survives edits elsewhere; drawn with the CSS Custom Highlight API (::highlight(sgit-highlight)), so the imported article is unchanged; the button follows its passage as the page scrolls. Counted per section in the reading map. Not yet carried to the vault (card 076, step 1). Test: admin/build/test_reading.mjs.

Back to the board.

For an agent

Issue 074 on newsroom.sgit.ai: Highlights: select, tap, kept in the browser, drawn without changing the page. Status done, kind feature, priority high, release v0.12.85. Source file admin/engineering/issues/done/074-highlights.md.