The biggest benefit of the laborious method seems to be in the flexibility of what constitutes a “match,” and in being able to easily affect neighboring or parent nodes in the tree.

Highlight Links

See how that works for you (remember to change the value of the myDomain variable at the beginning!).

/*********** VANITY ***************/
a[href*="earthlingsoft.net/"]
{
background-color: yellow !important;
}

It doesn’t make things prettier, but when I have to choose between a beauty contest and quick access to the info I’m interested in, the latter always wins.

function HighlightImagesTargetingURLContaining(theURLSubstring)
{
// For every img
var imgCount = document.images.length;
for (i=0; i < imgCount; i++)
{
var thisImg = document.images[i];
var imgOffset = thisImg.src.indexOf(theURLSubstring);
if (imgOffset != -1)
{
// Literally highlight it by setting the colors to
// something obnoxiously visible
thisImg.border = 16;
thisImg.style.borderColor = ‘#FF0000′;
thisImg.style.borderStyle = ‘dashed’;
}
}
}

I think you may be able to accomplish this just using the browser’s custom CSS feature. See this post by my friend tom:

http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=37

Specifically, doing the same highlight of urls containing red-sweater would be:

a[href!="red-sweater"] {
background-color: #FF0000;
color: #FFFFFF;
}

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of a way to select the parent element, which is this approach’s biggest limitation. The biggest benefit is obvious, its automatic and you don’t have to run a script.