By default unvisited links are blue and visited ones are purple. When styling my pages with css I’ll often change the default link color, and its color upon hover, but I haven’t yet defined a color on any of my pages for visited links (a:visited).
Personally, this is because I do not click on links based on whether I have visited them or not. I’ll gladly revisit a page I have visited before, after all things may have changed, I may have forgotten, or I may not have thouroughly explored previously.
Is a distinguished color for visited links important to you? Does it help you at all when choose which links to visit (or revisit)?
i try to set a default color and a hover color always. this is because i usually take the underline away from anchor tags so i want it to be apparent it is not just different colored text. i believe some of my projects also have a visited color. i think i mainly do this because it feels expected i suppose. websites i might browse have this behavior. but i am similar to you, i would visit something again regardless of having visited it previously. especially in the personal web context of our websites growing and changing. it is quite fair to expect that in a few months a page could be very different from when i last visited it
It’s important to me. I often use websites for reference, including my own, and sometimes it’s not easy to find specific information. Visited link color helps create a breadcrumb trail in that context. “Oh, I’ve tried there already.” So on my sites I always try to set different colors.
i think it’s useful for something like a webcomic or multi-chapter fiction, where i am going to click on every single link and need to know which ones i’ve already looked at. but outside of that i don’t super care. i use 3 different devices to browse the internet (phone, laptop, desktop) so visited/unvisited status isn’t really accurate/relevant most of the time.
It’s annoying that styling on a:visited is extremely limited. I’m probably being naïve, but I don’t understand the privacy benefits to allowing some, but not all style tweaks.
I like having visited links being a separate color; currently my website’s colors are based on web browser defaults, so visited links are distinct.
But now that I think about it, maybe I should add another visual indicator; I don’t think that even the default visited link color has enough contast with the normal link color to distinguish them. Is making the underline dashed one of the limited options for visited links?
I don’t do much with visited links besides color them, and I only do that in light mode because I do it in dark mode. Kinda tempted to do more than that, though.
I know they are styled differently by default and it’s important to some users, but I think that it’s no longer a strict requirement of the internet “social contract” to distinguish visited links, simply because so many sites have stopped doing this. Does discourse even? Here’s a link you’ve probably visited and one you haven’t:
It’s nice to be able to tell at a glance “have I seen this before?” but the truth is that usually you still want to know what is being referenced and seeing that the link is purple or hovering over it is typically not enough of a clue for this anyway… So even when I see a purple link, I often end up clicking and loading it just to remind myself of what that thing is. Internet isn’t slow now like it was in 2005, so this isn’t hard to do.
Design conventions have also evolved toward the idea of a “color scheme” where you pick a theme and accent color, and once you’ve used the accent color for links, it’s kinda hard to come up with a “visited link” color that is consistent with the color scheme—I suspect that might be why so many sites do away with the distinction. Cf. the 90s when “let’s just do a fuckton of random colors” was considered an acceptable design and adding purple into the mix was just cool.
Edit: Also, URLs aren’t even particularly stable anymore since they can contain named anchors and that snippets highlight thing that MS edge likes to insert every time you copy a link.
Not sure what they’re trying to achieve with noreferrer but the extra ref parameter would effectively change the meaning of visited link styling if it were in use there.
It’s a “fuck you” to Google that just so happens to preserve a little more of a visitor’s privacy. noreferer means that your browser won’t tell YouTube that you came to that page from a post on 404 Media.
When I say I’m not sure what they’re trying to achieve with noreferrer I don’t mean to say I don’t understand the technical operation. I mean to say I don’t understand the apparent contradiction with using it in conjunction with an added ref parameter that apparently serves nearly the same function.
They’re useful if the link isn’t something that you’re going to be going back and forth between often. Visited states aren’t helpful for navigation links, links on a dashboard, etc, but having a visited state on a list of external resources, for example, is super helpful for me. I always use a:link {...} and a:visited {...} instead of a {...} when setting the colors of my links anyways.
I like when visited links are a different color. It’s how I know what forum topics I’ve already read before clicking on them, for example. I always make my visited links a different shade of my regular link color. The hover color for both is usually the same, though.
This is a bad thing, IMO.
Having different types of information clearly distinguished from each other is really important for readability, and aesthetics are (almost) always a poor reason to move away from proper formatting.
I get what you mean about coherent colour schemes not being super easily adapted to include additional colours, but from my point of view the colour scheme’s first job is to make the site readily legible, looking nice is a secondary consideration. If your colour scheme produces a site that looks nice but is hard to read or navigate your colour scheme is bad, if it looks nice and is legible except for information it leaves out (like a:visited) then its an incomplete colour scheme, and any limits you’re imposing that prevent it being made complete are probably not worth having.
Unless you’re using a very strict scheme I don’t see why the standard approach of link = a colour , visited link = a slightly darker but related colour wouldn’t be coherent, and easy to implement.